I'll Get You Digital Learners! & Your Little Blogs Too!!

This video provided so many useful tools that it was kind of overwhelming! The video was about some children and a librarian who needed help doing various things that all had to do with sharing or gathering information online. The Wizard of Apps in my opinion offered all the helpful tools that anyone could ever ask for but was a little bit boring. If it wasn't for the slide show that corresponded to the video I would have been completely lost. The new tools workshop is a very helpful idea as well that made the ideas in the video a little easier to grasp since it provided access to the apps discussed. I guess that my most significant take away would be that when you're gathering, sharing, or organizing information from the web you should never be overwhelmed because the best tools are definitely out there, you just have to know where to look.



I loved the idea of a parody of the Wizard of Oz to make a movie about all the applications available for students to use while learning but I felt that the video was entirely too long. I found that I looked forward to the "wizard" portion of the movie and really dreaded the "slide show" portion because the film was so long. In fact, this is the only video that we have watched in this class that I didn't enjoy. I actually noticed that I had to force myself to pay attention through much of it where I hadn't ever had to do that with previous videos in this class. I think the information presented in the video was extremely important and the Wizard of Oz theme was was an excellent idea. I just feel that maybe the information could have been cut down a little to keep the viewer engaged.

I hope that in my own classroom I can present my students with tools, widgets, and applications to help them get as much out of technology as possible. My students will be very very young and I'm not sure that I can offer them as much help as older children because they won't have as many problems with presenting information and filtering through information online but I hope to offer help with everything I can. Classroom blogs are a great way to share helpful sites and tools with parents as well as students. I will try to keep my classroom blog and personal teacher site always up to date with the latest tools and tips to keep even young children safe and their experiences online effective ones. If these lessons can be learned at an early age they can be built upon over a lifetime.

Digital footprints have recently been an interest of mine because I knew so little about them in the past. I picked the site Pipl that was introduced in the video to check out and work on a little. I searched myself as well as some of my friends. I found that the site went much deeper than a simple Google search and turned up some things that were very interesting. I'm happy to report that I found a clean digital footprint under my personal search and even happier that I had the opportunity to learn more about how everything done online and all the personal information given can show up somewhere so everyone needs to be careful.