Week 11: 4/20/2021
Digital Portfolio Overview
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Let's start with a brief overview of what a digital portfolio is, and what a digital portfolio isn't. Spoiler alert: in an interview, they shouldn't need to ask, "have you been teaching 3rd grade for a few years" if you've never taught third grade. You're creating a website to accurately capture your work as a pre-service, FSU student who hopes to be a teacher someday. You're NOT pretending to be a teacher. The former, if well developed, is an incredibly authentic assignment that will get you hired. The latter is a lie, and you'll forget you created it by the time you're interviewing.
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Web Presence vs. Web Absence:
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As educators, it is imperative that we cultivate our web presence. The internet is where we go to find information about everything, including teachers. If you're not in control of your own web presence, it means that someone else will control the narrative.
After enjoying this presentation, answer the prompt on Google Classroom. |
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Break!
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Our final assignment is web based, and as such, it is necessary to view and evaluate effective websites that exist online. Tragically, to do so, we need to look outside the field of education, as well as within it. Today, we'll create web-design rubrics of our own, view some real-life working websites inside and outside the field of education, and begin our work with either Weebly or Google Sites.
Today, we're learning about teacher websites, a subject that I hold near and dear to my heart. We'll use an article from Teachnology to create our own web-design rubrics. Here is an example of a web-design rubric I use with my 8th graders, as well as all the other rubrics I use [the two and four-point rubrics are not mine, they are NYS rubrics.] As you read the article, create a rubric that:
Once we've created our rubrics, we'll use them to assess three teacher websites: mine, and any two others. If it's anything like most years, the difficulty of this task isn't in assessing the websites, its with finding teachers that have websites at all. |
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Week 12: 4/27/2021
Social Media, Digital Presence, and Digital Contact
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We are going to start talking social media. I'd imagine a college student would expect the official message to be "don't use social media with students and parents," but it would be absurd not to. It's a user-friendly interface that's always free, parents and kids are used to using it, and it links your classroom information with their actual phones! The ones they're staring at RIGHT NOW! That being said, while social media is an immensely powerful tool, following a few simple rules will keep your digital nose clean and your personal life private.
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Students always struggle with finding pictures that make them look like they're authentically teachers. (Remember, we're not pretending that we're teachers, but you definitely want to look like you've worked with kids for this digital portfolio.) Until this semester, I just kinda shrugged my shoulders and let students figure it out, but that seemed unfair, so this semester I put together this list of the types of images you can take and use before leaving campus for Thanksgiving to make sure you look like an authentic, real, teacher candidate. I'm not worried about the copyright issues with Google image searches, but professional, Google image searched classrooms will ring false with interviewers. An actual picture of yourself by a white board? That's the ticket!
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Break!
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For our second activity, we'll spend some time experimenting with and exploring our recommended web-design software: Weebly. It's the software I use to host my actual website... you know, the one that you're looking at right now. It's excellent software, but there is more of a learning curve than any of the other programs we've used, so we'll spend liberal amounts of time modelling and practicing, and checking off a list of skills you'll need before you can freely design your own sites for your digital portfolio.
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Week 13: 5/4/2021
Website Writers WorkshopThe biggest mistake that students make on their digital portfolios is to publish too few words. Effective websites have titles, and descriptions, and original images, and they portray a conversational sense of who the publisher is, whether that publisher be a corporation or a human. Today, we'll look at the balance of text and the digital tools used to bring that text into the 21st century to ensure that our web-design work is adequate of our capstone assignment.
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