Today I finally took the plunge and purchased a domain name for my class website.  I’ve had a class website since 2007 and it’s been hosted on a variety of sites, but since I didn’t want to pluck money down to purchase a domain, I always had a url with a company’s name within it.  Normally I didn’t really care except last year when I had to move from MobileMe.  My department and I decided to move our sites to MacMate which seemed to be fine but like other sites our urls included “macmate” within it.  Truth be told, it’s just way too long of a url for students to type in…especially those who don’t know how to bookmark a site.

This summer I decided to move my website to Weebly so that it was cloud-based instead of dependent on where my iWeb domain file was.  I love it.  Weebly is easy to use  – sure it had its quirks – what site doesn’t?  But it only took me about three hours to move everything over.  I’m still toying with the idea of purchasing the PRO plan because then I can password protect certain pages which would come in handy when posting pictures of students or student work.  I’m going to table that for now.

The other thing I did this morning was purchase Evernote Premium.  =D  I’ve spent the better part of today organizing all of my files between Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, and my MBP.  And even though one can’t easily see the progress…believe me, I’ve done quite a bit of work.  I’m almost ready for the school year to start.  No, I haven’t done any lesson planning, but I’ve spent a good deal of time looking over the reading and writing literacy skills for history; grabbing any an all information about DBQs and the DBQ Project; and of course rebuilding my class website.  My work laptop has been fixed and it’s almost ready to go.  The next item on my list is to download Reflector so that I can be ready to roll out PD to my staff and students on how to use iPads.  This is a very exciting time for me!  I love technology, but I also love getting organized.

Now it’s time to do what summers are best for…napping and relaxing.  Two more weeks…….

Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t like to be the center of attention and I don’t especially like to talk about myself.  But I was prompted to create an About.me profile for an assignment for the LEC Digital Educator.

It always feels a bit weird to me to list one’s accolades.  I mean, I had no problem doing that for my vitae, but to me that’s different because my vitae only goes to specific people whereas my About.me profile seems to be instantly public.  I tried to figure out how to make it relatively private…I mean, I don’t need random people to see who I am.  This is my biggest issue with social media and social networking.  I think there should be more control over who sees what.  Sure there are people out there who have no qualms about sharing details of their personal life with the greater world but there are also those of us who are not so comfortable.  I can see why district administrators are worried about giving students access to social media tools.  Sure, we can teach students netiquette and the rules of digital citizenship.  We can caution them on what not to share.  But we can do very little if social media tools do not give individuals the right to determine how much we share and to whom we share that information (Facebook is a perfect example – every change they make seems to revert my privacy permissions).  You might ask, “Then why post information on social media sites?”  My answer, “Because we need to establish a digital presence.”  It’s important in this day and age.  Period.

Believe me, I have no problem with social media tools and social networking.  I just find it frustrating that there aren’t more ways for us to control who sees what.  I don’t regret creating an About.me page, but I don’t see myself keeping my About.me page after this certification course is over.

Today I hosted the webinar “Introduction to Edmodo”.  This is my third webinar for OCDE and I think I’m finally getting the hang of facilitating and moderating a webinar using WebEx.

What I like most about webinars though is meeting new teachers.  Today’s webinar afforded me the opportunity have teachers create their Edmodo account, set up a group, join our Edmodo Webinar group, post a note, and participate in a poll.  If you think about it, it was quite a bit to do within a 60 minute period!  This was a participatory webinar.  😉

In fact, I was going through the presentation, demonstrating certain features of Edmodo, answering questions, etc. and then I looked at the clock.  Holy smokes!  Where does the time go?!?!  I could have easily used an extra 10 minutes.  Oh well.  Next time.

Hopefully the teachers found this presentation informative.  I spent additional time after the webinar talking with a couple of teachers about Edmodo and technology.  I even sent out connection requests through Edmodo to the teachers who attended the webinar today.  What makes us strong as teachers is our ability to connect with fellow educators.  And Edmodo provides an avenue for just that.