Stockton Students 

"Move in day was the scariest day of my life... or so I thought! All summer long I was anxious yet excited to start my college experience at Stockton University. Before I knew it my parents were saying goodbye as I unpacked my last box in my dorm room. I remember it like it was yesterday seeing hundred of new people in a new environment and i wasn't sure if i could handle it.. but luckily I was happier than ever and even have a few tips for your freshman year the best experience too!"~Valerie

1. Don't Be Afraid To Get Involved
2. Always Try New Things
3. Connect With Future Roommate 
4. Talk About Expectations
5. Don't Worry If You Are Still Undecided
6. Always Ask Professors If You Need Help!
   

A Good Farewell to Gen2243

This past semester  I have learned a ton of useful information in the course Exploring Your Digital Portfolio, and I can not wait to incorporate these tools into my bright future. Below I have listed some of the best tools I learned about this semester. I hope anyone who comes across this can take this very helpful information and truly use these amazing tools for an easier and very productive work environment.

Microsoft Onenote

Microsoft OneNote is the perfect program guaranteed to make things a little easier. In fact, tons of Microsoft windows user do not even know they have it already installed, even though it has been wight the Office bundles for years now. OneNote is perfect for keeping yourself organized. The notes taken on the program are          automatically synced to your other devices using Microsoft's OneDrive service. Also, This semester I had the pleasure of speaking to Robyn Hrvinatz. Robyn is a Senior Teacher Engagement Manager at Microsoft. Robyn was truly a pleasure to talk to and fit perfectly in the classroom environment. She even uses technology and integrates it into the classroom. I asked Robyn, what are some of these technologies that she loves to integrate into the classroom? Her answer was exactly what I was thinking too, and that was Microsoft Onenote.

Weebly

Weebly is an incredible way to not only to create a website, but also have it looking as professional as possible! The company was founded in 2007, and it allows users to easily create an online blog, website, or store. The website offers tons of different layouts and works on any device. The basic layouts are completely free for anyone to use, but premium and enterprise offerings are an additional fee that allow for endless new designs and steps for your dreams to come true when constructing your ideal site. So come join millions of users in one of the highest rated web building sites out to date! Check out my site below!

http://mattsantino.weebly.com

Paper.li

I believe I speak for everyone by saying I enjoy fresh and exciting news on the daily! Well, now there's a great way to do so. Paper.li allows us to do exactly that by creating personalized newspapers with topics that interest each of us. The website states, "We believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to curate the content that matters most. We also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this 'massive content world' we live in. We’re here to help!" The site helps millions of users view endless amounts on interesting mthaterial and truly sends out a caring message. This saves tons of time surfing the web for articles because you have already selected exactly what you are looking for. This great service also allows you to follow and learn from smart people, without investing all your personal time on Twitter.

In conclusion, this course with the help of the great professor Kyle Calderwood, truly helped me expand my PLN with the most useful and truly helpful tools and techniques. The blogging and Twitter portion of the class was probably the most important aspect to me, and I have already started building those connections in my communication field. Interacting with other classmates too helps, because one day I will have to work with complete strangers and have a group effort to solve whatever problem or idea we must work on.

Create An Amazing Website With Weebly!

Weebly is an incredible way to not only to create a website, but also have it looking as professional as possible! The company was founded in 2007, and it allows users to easily create an online blog, website, or store. The website offers tons of different layouts and works on any device. The basic layouts are completely free for anyone to use, but premium and enterprise offerings are an additional fee that allow for endless new designs and steps for your dreams to come true when constructing your ideal site. So come join millions of users in one of the highest rated web building sites out to date! The video below will go into depth on how the website is one of the best for creating a beautiful website.

David Rusenko the CEO of Weebly announced this past year that the company is launching the third generation of its product called Carbon. He stated that, “With Carbon, it’s not like we’re going to build everything,” Rusenko said. But the update positions Weebly as “the place where you can log in and find a one-stop shop for running and growing your business.” Carbon will include an app center with 40 partner starter apps. The whole Weebly itself got an update as well, with a new look, new themes, and a quicker system, the site will be easier than ever before!

The newest addition to Weebly is relatively new, and it is called Weebly Promote! Promote will be a platform for building marketing emails. CEO David Rusenko stated that, “Email marketing is the number two concern for small businesses behind their website,”. Sending those emails should be a “no brainer,” especially since the Direct Marketing Association has reported that email marketing has a 4,300 percent return on investment. The website allows the same drag and drop tools the use for websites to make it less complicated for the users. Many small business to the site say that it has helped their sales drastically increase! So far Weebly Promote is only available to limited users of the already existing platform, but they hope to make it available to everyone soon starting at only eight dollars a month!

After reading Chapter 9 in The Connected Educator, I realized that many educators still believe the web is used solely as a digital filing cabinet. They do not realize the impact of social media, and how much it has evolved. The internet makes collaboration a piece of cake through finding new people and exchanging ideas. The web offers opportunities that we can integrate into classrooms across the country, but it is not about changing the tools we use, but changing how teachers teach in the modern world. Teachers teach the methods they know through what they have been taught, or because they simply don't know how to use these different technologies. However, soon enough teachers will have evolved beyond delivering curriculum, and instead be connected coaches who understand how to help students construct their own learning. 

Robyn Hrvinatz 

This week I had the privilege of meeting Robyn Hrvinatz, a Senior Teacher Engagement Manager at Microsoft. Robyn was truly a pleasure to talk to and fit perfectly in the classroom environment. She even uses technology and integrates it into the classroom. I asked Robyn, what are some of these technologies that she loves to integrate into the classroom? Her answer was exactly what I was thinking too, and that was Microsoft Onenote. Onenote is a great collaboration tool, and truly allows students to participate in activities depending on what their work cycle is like, and what works for them. This is the future for our education system, and we must embrace these tools for the best learning experience of a lifetime. 

Helpful Social Media Tools For An Easier Life

I believe I speak for everyone by saying I enjoy fresh and exciting news on the daily! Well, This past week in my class we discussed a great way to do so. Paper.li allows us to do exactly that by creating personalized newspapers with topics that interest each of us. The website states, "We believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to curate the content that matters most. We also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this 'massive content world' we live in. We’re here to help!" The site helps millions of users view endless amounts on interesting material and truly sends out a caring message. This saves tons of time surfing the web for articles because you have already selected exactly what you are looking for. This great service also allows you to follow and learn from smart people, without investing all your personal time on Twitter. Below I have listed 5 useful ways to use paper.li

1. Keep up when you're away: Unable to check Twitter? log on to paper.li to see what you've missed.
2. Learn more about a particular topic: Subscribe to whatever interests you.
3. Share a paper.li summary with non-Twitter people: Share the weekly email with your twiterless friends.
4. Get the best info from people, even without following them: You can add smart people to a Twitter list, even if you don’t want to follow everything they say.
5. Follow a topic or an event by hashtag: Follow interesting hashtags to make searching easier.

Another amazing online tool that makes life a little easier is called If This Then That, or IFTTT for short. IFTTT is a site that allows you to create your own recipes that give you control over your apps. Recipes are the simple connection between products and apps. An example of a recipe would be someone creating a recipe that whenever they are tagged in a photo on Facebook, that photo gets saved to their cloud based archive. Basically, you create a simple instruction through the apps you love, and use daily. I listed below some of the major social media platforms that the app works with, along with the best recipes you can make!

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Vine
• Tumblr
• YouTube
• Pintrest

These recipes can be very useful for whatever you want to complete. They also come in handy if you are known to be a very forgetful person like myself! The article, The best IFTTT recipes for forgetful people shows how by using this recipe maker, maybe you can get back on track and stay alert. Some of the best recipes I had read about are switching to wifi, finding your phone, and most importantly paying your bills on time! So first off, everyone has done it and for some it ends up being too late already, because when you forget to switch to wifi you may already have used up all that precious data. Well now for Android users, with ifttt all you have to do is make a recipe IF you enter your house THEN it connects to home wifi automatically. Next, losing your hone is stressful enough, but worry no more! This recipe allows the distressed phone loser to send an email to there phone in which the phone rings allowing for an easy find. Lastly, paying your bills should always be a main priority, but of course it is natural to forget. This last ifttt recipe allows you to send yourself a text message monthly on a specific day and time to get on that payment. This also works by sending emails as well! 

                                 

In chapter four of Untangling the Web, the author goes into detail about how social media and education go hand-in-hand. Social media is only expanding, and it is important to integrate it into our learning environment. One social network that has become very popular targeted towards schools is Edmodo. Edmodo is an educational website that takes the idea of a social network platform, and makes it appropriate for the classroom environment. In fact, this was one of the first educational and technology based tools I learned during my junior year of high school. My teacher would always post assignments and videos, and it truly helped us with the difficult course. I also would use a more well known tool in my classrooms, and it was twitter. This allowed the class to stay in touch outside the classroom to share information for whatever topic we were learning the next day. Our teacher would then display our content on the smart board, which made it effortless and gave us more time to discuss our findings. 

Using tools to support connected learning!

"Technology in communities  is essentially just a means of creating fluidity between knowledge segments ... and connecting people." ~ George Siemens, researcher on learning, The University of Athabasca. 

After reading Chapter 6 of The Connected Educator, I discovered many helpful ways to use online tools, and integrate them with my learning experiences. One site I read about that relates to me so well, and helps me organize content I find interesting is called Delicious! This site helps me bookmark my content and tags websites for me. This site can truly be useful for anyone in school especially trying to remember all those helpful sites you are using when doing research, or doing a project. Every time you find an interesting webpage, you can incude the web address in your delicious account, and add tags so you can find it again! This would help me and many others of course when creating my works cited list. Also, another thing I have come to actually enjoy very much this year is blogging, microblogging especially. Microblogging tools help us share information quickly and to a larger audience as well. One example of this would be Twitter. Twitter is accessible from a smart phone or computer, and truly changed the face of blogging all together. Tweeting is like a small blog in the fact that you only have 140 character to get your point across. Twitter allows you to follow those who you may have common interests with, and share information at the click of a button. One huge benefactor of twitter is that microblogging time investment is minimal, and at the same time Twitter is so large and diverse you can easily find a broad network of people to collaborate with in seconds!

 Although all these websites are very helpful, they could also be very harmful to our reputations as well! Everyone should definitely think before they post on social media, and a great way to approach this is to proactively build your digital footprint. You should be professional at all times, because you never know when that old post will com back to haunt you. A great example of this would be the case of an Atalanta man named Gerod Roth. Gerod was fired over racist post in September of 2015, when he took a photo of himself and a co-worker's three year old son Cayden. Mr Roth posted the picture on his Facebook, and him and his friend proceeded to make racist comments like "I didn't know you were a slave owner.", and "Help feed this poor child today."The marketing executive was quickly fired along with some other commentors on the post. This just goes to show the impact of one click of a button, and how it truly changed his life within seconds! So remember... be smart, safe, and aware no matter who you think is watching. 

Step Into the World of Augmented Reality

So what exactly is Augmented Reality?

Augmented reality is defined as an enhanced image or environment as viewed on a screen or other display produced by overlying computer generated images, sounds, or other data on a real world environment. Augmented reality is available through our mobile smartphones such as the iPhone. These smartphones contain GPRS which takes information about a particular geographical location, which then can be overlaid with tags, images, etc connected with this location. This virtual world is popping up all over our own world from museums, zoos, schools, and even Nasa. This new technology has also been proven to be very educational, and enhances the world right in front of us!

One of my favorite augmented reality apps is called Zookazam! Zookazam provides children, teachers, and parents a new way to learn by bringing animals to life using 3D animation. The free app has more than 45 different animals to choose from, and they can be brought to life anywhere you are. The app is so unique in the fact that it is the first educational augmented reality app to require no marker whatsoever. Which I am sure that most parents will be happy to hear about as well. This app brings to life tons of different animal life and tells you facts about each interesting species. This is truly an extraordinary way to learn about animals, no matter where you might be. 

Just click on which species to select and its as simple as that!

This awesome app that I wish was around when I was younger, allows children to take their own photographs of the animals too! Simply print off the targets, and when viewed through the screen of the app, animals magically appear. This app also allows you to add lighting and weather affects to add to the realness. Many teachers also have used them as a prompt for creative writing: for example, just what would happen if someone brought a hippo into school? These exciting and creative new apps are the future, so what are you waiting for? Dive into the world of augmented reality and start exploring!

Lastly, another new and exciting app thats becoming very popular in 2016, is Where To Go. This free app is perfect if you are in a familiar, or unfamiliar area for business or vacation, and you need to find the closest grocery store, museum, pharmacy, doctor, business, etc. The app is for finding different points of interest and is available globally having over 500 location types! This great new system even has turn-by-turn directions to the destination you are planning to arrive at. One other great concept it has is, if you can not decide where to go, simply shake your phone and the app gives you a great new place to explore based on reviews. This is something definitely worth downloading and giving it a try for yourself!

Sick of powerpoint?

I think I can speak for everyone when I say seeing the same old powerpoint presentations can get old very fast. Growing up in a time when all we knew were powerpoint presentations, made it seem like their weren't any options, however in todays more modern and tech savvy times things have surely changed. Today there are tons of different programs and tools being used for a more interesting and easy way to share your ideas. One of them being an amazingly free site called Goanimate.com. The site allows you to tell your story in a fun and animated way! The site is such a hit because you don't need any artistic abilities and has a huge variety of characters, backgrounds, languages, sounds, props, etc to choose from. Teachers can use this to truly engage their students in education and can be used for a handful of scenarios that I have listed below. Personally, I found the site to be very easy and useful and even managed to use it for class presentations a few times as well, one specifically a stockton commercial.

Classroom Uses:

• Foreign Languages
• Student to student tutorials
• Creative writing
• Communication and special needs
• Behavioral training (Bullying awareness)
• And tons more

There is also another great platform that is becoming very popular called Animoto. Animoto allows you to combine text, images, and clips and turn them into awesome videos. This site is very simple to use, and is cloud based so students or really anyone can access it from anywhere! The site is perfect for educators and students,  and it can truly make a presentation come alive in the classroom. Everything can be accessed too with the free light version, however if you want more HD videos, or longer multi song videos there will be additional fees. 

This site is perfect for teachers and students in and out of the classroom to connect what they are learning and turning it into a visual masterpiece.  Once you are finished share with your friends and show them what you created, and I'm guaranteed you will be happy with the results. The set up to making a great video is simple and I will list the steps below...

• Choose a style for your video (Tons to choose from)
• Add music ( Upload music or some that students created in something like garage band)
• Add photos and videos
• Add text slides, and tell your story

I hope some of these useful ways of digital storytelling helped, and next time there is a presentation to be done you steer away from powerpoint!

Astronaut Abby

This week I had the privilege of meeting an inspiring 18 year old Abigail Harrison, with dreams of venturing out to Mars. It was very interesting learning about her growing up and truly dedicating her time to setting goals to a bright future. Abigail otherwise known as Astronaut Abby, has a very impressive story about working hard and meeting with some of the best in the space exploration field from engineers, to various astronauts. My favorite part of the discussion was her talking about social media and how she reaches out to her followers and supporters. She discusses the different social media platforms for which age group is focused on, for example she uses Instagram for a younger age group. Also, Abby stated that "Adding personal content humanizes the aspect of the situation." I liked that, because its very true! She shows pictures of space, but also he personal life which shows she's just like everybody else. One other crucial piece of information I really thought was important was when we discussed the 24 hour rule. This means that in networking you should contact business associates that you meet within 24 hours of having met them, whether it be Twitter, email, or LinkedIn you have to be reaching out and reinforcing connections! I can't wait to see what is in store for her future, and I believe she will make it to Mars.