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.