Professional Portfolios

I had a chance to learn about digital professional portfolios this week. I was amazed at this concept and surprised that I haven't heard of them before. The three portfolios are a personal website, plaxo, and linkedin. They all share a common benefit in the fact that they're digital and can be accessed on the web by whoever need be. They also have an easy set up process that makes it convenient to get started. Each professional portfolio that was created ended up looking very professional and easy to read, which is a benefit when using it for any career related activity. I was very impressed by all three portfolios.

Library Thing

I'm not exactly the biggest reading gooroo you'll come across, but I like to pick up a good book once every few months, and the library thing is a great tool to help me select the types of books that I'm into. I love to read Christian based novels. They're very encouraging to me, and because of the books that I added to my library, I now have many suggestions of similar books of interest. What a great piece of technology!

Generator

I just had a blast playing around with the online generators! It took me awhile to get it figured out at first. For some reason it wouldn't create the magazine cover that I was trying to make, but it eventually worked. I was pretty cool. I made a subway magazine cover with a picture I uploaded from facebook. I was scarfing my face with a sandwich, so I thought it would be suitable.

Podcast Searches

Once again, I am amazed at how many useful tools there are on the web. Another tool that I just learned about is the website www.podcast.com. It has a seriously large amount of podcasts on all different types of topics. This could be extremely useful in my line of work. The only issue that I could see with this website is to not know which podcast to choose from after looking for a certain topic because there are so many, which is a good problem to have.

YouTube Video

For some reason my computer won't let me place the YouTube video that I selected inside this blog. If you would like to check it out it's titled Physical Education Teacher: Grades 3-5.

You Tube

You Tube is a website that I am already quite familiar with. I have watched many different videos strictly for entertainment purposes, but now that I'm preparing for my future career, I can see how youtube would be a great tool that could assist me in my tasks. First off, there are lots of different ideas that I could get from other people who posted videos. I learned a great variation to the game tag from youtube. It's called triangle tag, and that's just one example of how youtube could be beneficial as a future physical educator. I like youtube that much more now that I know it will assist me in my field of work.

Technorati

Well, I just discovered another tool that could be beneficial in my career. The website is called technorati, and it's basically a huge data base of blogs that people have created. The cool thing about this website is that there are so many topics that could be discovered. One thing that I thought was rather strange was there are three different ways to look up a topic of blogs, and only one way seems to be of good use. I searched for kinesiology under blogs, and I had 28 results pop up, but when I searched for kinesiology blogs under posts, tags, and blog directory I couldn't find anything. I wonder if that's because it's a fairly new tool and they're still working out the kinks. I guess that means I'll just have to search for what I need under the blogs section.

Del.icio.us

After learning about the website del.icio.us, I found that this is another great tool that is very useful in my future line of work. There are thousands of different tags of great websites that can be very beneficial for my line of work. I simply typed in Kinesiology, and there were numerous amounts of webpages that people tagged that I could use. I also liked how organized it made things from the titles that people gave them. If I was looking for something specific like information on different types of leg work outs, then I could type in leg workouts and 109 tagged websites would be available. This is a great tool that I just discovered!

Technology

I have learned more about technology these past couple of weeks than I have in my whole life! It has been great to learn so much about the use of technology because I was never really up to par on everything. It usually takes me awhile to learn how to use certain technologies, so I'm not what you would call a tech goo-roo. I've really enjoyed learning about so many different things, and I feel like I am more prepared to be an effective physical education instructor. One of the technologies that really stood out to me was the RSS. I really like how convenient this can make things. This could be a great help to me in my future career because I could have different feeds related to my field sent to my reader, and that will help me to stay up to date on the latest trends within physical education. I also really enjoyed the podcasting lesson. I think it would be great to make podcasts on how to perform certain excercises and have them available for my students to listen to from their own home. This would help them to be more physically active since they could have my guidance even though I'm not presently with them. Technology is evolving like crazy, and I'm glad that I had the opportunity to learn all that I have so far.

Web 2.0

It must sound like I'm a broken record, but I've never heard of such a thing as Web 2.0. This is another great use of technology. This website really seems to really organize your search engine experience. I really like how everything is categorized and in an orderly manner. One website that I came across that I thought was really cool is istats in the sports section. What a great way to track your personal results. This would be a great website to have your students use to keep progress of their own results. I think that giving them ownership like that would really encourage them to put forth their best effort. Web 2.0 is a great tool, and I'm definately going to start using it more often.

Google Docs

Another cool discovery that I just had this week in my Masters program is the use of Google Docs. This is another great use of technology that could be very beneficial for my career. This would be an easy way to keep a good line of communication with my students and their parents. If I needed to send out some sort of memo or info sheet, I could create the document on google docs and have the students fill it out from the web. There shouldn't ever be any excuses for losing a paper or anything like that. It's nice that you can upload these documents onto google rather than having to save and store them on a zip drive. This would make it a much easier process to send files to other people since there is no need for attachments or emailing.

RSS Assignment

I recently completed an RSS and feeds assignment for my technology class. To be completely honest, I had never heard of such a thing entering this task. After learning about how they work and why we use them I was blown away! What a cool thing it is to have all the news come to me rather than wasteing time by searching for it. I've always surfed the internet by bouncing back and forth from all of my favorite sites to get my news, but now I have the luxury of having it come directly to my reader account. Now I'll actually have time to read the articles. If only I heard about this earlier!

Interesting use of Technology

This week in my technology course we were required to complete a few tasks in regards to photos, images, and microblogging. I never thought I would say this, but I set up a twitter account. That's right, I officially have a twitter account. I always swore that I wouldn't, but you have to keep the professor happy! It was actually pretty interesting. I'm going to be sending a twit every day, so if you have time you should follow me to see what I have to say. We also performed a couple more assignments, such as opening flicker and facebook accounts. We even started our own podcast, which was pretty confusing at first, but turned out to be really fun. This was a pretty cool week of assignments, and I sure did learn a lot!

Test Post

Hello everybody! This is my very first post on my new blog. I'm mainly wanting to see if I set my profile up correctly. Seems to be working well so far!
I am very excited about my upcoming journey. This is week one of my masters program, and I'm so eager to learn as much as I possibly can over the next fourteen months.
The program that I'm enrolled in is Kinesiology with a Physical Education Emphasis. This is a very exciting time for me because I've been looking forward to taking this program for three and a half years, and the big moment has finally arrived.
I grew up heavily involved in sports, and I even coached a couple years of high school football while going through college. I new I wanted to be a physical educator, but unfortunatly I was given back advice by my counselors and other P.E. teachers. I was told that I wouldn't get a job after college for a few years due to the lack of available positions within the school district.
I didn't want to be working in a restaurant for years after college, so I decided to get my bachelors degree in Elementary Education with the intention of getting my masters in physical education. Well, I've dedicated the last three and a half years to Elementary Education, which has been great, but I'm so excited that I'm finally pursueing my passion!
This is the moment that I've been waiting for for so long, so I'm going to enjoy the journey over the next fourteen months, and enjoy learning as much as I can about the wonderful world of physical education.