Week One: Dabbling In The ICT Pool

I use the computer for virtually everything I do. I cannot imagine doing research without access to the Internet, or writing without being able to type. Outside of school, this is little different. I use instant messagers extensively and Skype occasionally for communication with others, including with many people whom I have never met "face-to-face" and yet consider myself to have very real friendships with. Even when I go to play Dungeons & Dragons (there's a subtle nod to it in the title of this blog), I use mainly books in PDF version as well as various online programs to ease the burden of being a Dungeon Master.

And yet, the truth is that I'm little more than a neophyte in the world of technology. If the technological world is seen as an ocean, I've been little more than a duck dabbling at the surface. I'm a little nervous about diving into largely uncharted waters, but excited as well. We've had two weeks in the class thus far, and I'll be taking much of the time on this blog to discuss what has happened and what we've begun to explore in that time.

One of the first activities we engaged in was to make a Wordle, in which we thought up words and phrases related to ICT and put them in the program to create a world cloud, which we then formatted to suit our interests and submitted. The world cloud is an excellent visual way of dissecting a text, with key concepts naturally coming to the surface and lesser ones being subsumed. We also learned in this exercise how important it is to be flexible regarding technology- it wouldn't save adequately on my computer for some reason, so I had to export it to Microsoft Document Writer and submit that file.

Another neat little exercise we did was to put up both questions and things we were passionate about on the WallWisher program, a neat little application which allows you to paste things on an online "wall" shareable only by people in a particular group. I could see the WallWisher program being useful for classroom use in a wide variety of topics well beyond technology itself. It could be used as an activation exercise in a unit, by getting students to post something that they know or think they know, as well as something they don't know or would like to learn about. The results could be an excellent way of stimulating discussion before getting on to the primary material of the class.

On Thursday, we were introduced to the concept of the eportfolio, which I think would probably be an overall more convenient means of storing a portfolio than a paper version, especially for me. Instead of bringing a cumbersome copy of a paper portfolio to an interview that may be hard to replace, you could simply provide a link to it on your resume or offer it up in one format or another during the interview process. Even if it is rarely examined, your portfolio provides a means of organizing and proritizing your accomplishments and attributes and may serve a valuable part in organizing your interview, even if it is never explicitly referred to or even mentioned.