Final Blog Post - Week 12

Hey everyone! I can't believe this course is over, it has been a great journey so far and I have learned so much about the digital world. After being involved in the digital world much more than I have ever been before, I believe I have created strong positive footprints in it. A google search of my name shows a link to my Linkedin profile. I think after this course and my constant digital activity, my presence of my digital footprint has become much more visible as shown by the Google search.

I think I learned about a lot of things, one of which is how to build a positive digital footprint. I think building a positive footprint revolves mainly around digital responsibilities. Being digitally responsible will definitely help you leave a positive footprint, but will also help you become a better digital citizen. A good digital footprint is an essential part of being a good digital citizen, among many things.

I leaned that positive digital citizenship can promote positive interactions with others online. It allows more respectful and meaningful relationships between people online. Also it allows efficient transfer of knowledge between people all over the world online. Being a good digital citizen helps make the digital world a much better place and improves everyone's experience in it.

I will promote goodv digital citizenship by doing seveal things. Some of these things include starting discussions about what a good digital citizen is and trying to advocate good digital citizenship. I have found many valuable sites that helps advocate these ideas and also support people who wish to learn more about being a good digital citizen.

As a good digital citizen, I can help others develop their knowledge much better by using many of the digital tools like Google Docs I learned about in this course. This will allow me to efficiently reach many people online and teach them about my experiences of learning about digital citizenship. There are many online communities that correspond with my interests and beliefs which I will follow. Some communities are like the national geographic forum which I can discuss topics of interest to me but also display attributes of being a good digital citizen.

Thanks for reading everyone! It has really been a wonderful experience exploring the many digital tools in this class and I will continue to employ the things I have learned here in my life.

Billy

Weekly Report & Reflection Post #11 - Jing

Hey everyone, its been another great week and I am sad to say I am almost at the end of the road for this class. I've learned so much about digital tools and what it means to be a digital citizen. In this week's exploration, I came by a fantastic tool that I have never used before, a screencast software. Screencast softwares are typically used to make video tutorials and guides online, found in sites such as Youtube. It does this by capturing a video of your computer screen and audio at the same time if you so desire!

I explored a screencast software called Jing. It is a free software by TechSmith and it does everything you could possibly want in a screencast software. I really like Jing because it lets you capture any part of your screen that you want, making it really customizable and as a result allows you to customize it to your audience. Tools like Jing will definitely be useful to my educational activities as it can not only let me learn through tutorial videos made by others but it will also allow me to reinforce my own knowledge by creating videos for others! When others use Jing to create a video tutorial, I always find them extremely interesting and understandable. This is because I am a visual learner, I can learn something much better and faster if I see it done then compared to me reading instructions or hearing instructions without the visual aspect. So Jing really fits into the way I learn and will enhance my digital learning experience and knowledge building.

I think Jing is different from some of the other communication and collaborative tools I have used in the past. This is because unlike tools like Google Docs, Jing is a one way communication tool. The creator of the video or image with Jing shares it with others and transfers their knowledge to the viewer. Whereas other collaborating tools like Google Docs can be a two way communication tool, that is they allow transfer of knowledge between parties. Both sides can edit the creation and work on it collaboratively. Jing is also a unique presentation tool in terms of it being something that basically takes a mirror what you are physically doing in real time and using that as your presentation. I would put Jing into my PLE's Synthesizing and Creating category. This is because that is what Jing essentially is, it allows you to synthesize something from your computer. I would definitely add this to my PLE because I can see it as extremely useful in the future if I wish to share my digital knowledge through a video format.

Province of Ontario, source

I want to share an  article/news release from the government of Ontario that talks about helping universities focus on their unique strengths. First of all, I think this is a great idea. I think that in order to advance the level of post-secondary education in Canada, universities need to specialize more in field that they are good at. For example, it well known that University of Waterloo has a great computer science program. And I think if more universities like Brock can focus and be great at something, Canadian education as a whole will benefit. I think that universities should also expand their learning environments as the news release says. For example, universities should offer more online courses and options in order to expand the ways students can access education.

That's it for this week, my final week is approaching in week 12 as I discuss how my PLE has changed! Thanks for reading.

Billy

Copyright Information

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Weekly Report & Reflection Post #10 - Animoto

This week I explored some new Digital tools including a slideshow maker called Animoto! Animoto is a great tool to make a quick presentation regardless of the topic. Once you make an account, it allows you to choose from a variety of background themes. Then you can upload pictures of your choice for your slideshow. Animoto also allows you to add from a list of music provided, to use as background music. Of course you can also add text to the slideshow to be more informative. Overall, this tool allows you to build a very quick and informative slideshow that is great for school presentations or to compliment an assignment. I think the slideshows created via tools like Animoto are great as resources for school work for several reasons. One of them simply being that it is extremely easy! Creating what looks like a very sophisticated slideshow will take only minutes and knowledge of computer programming is not necessary. Another reason I think Animoto is great for educational purposes is because it is really fun to watch, it can get points across very easily and efficiently. It is not meant to convey complicated concepts or ideas, but it is great for giving a preview of what you want to talk about and can set a direction for where you want to go. When I use to think of slideshows, I would think of PowerPoint by Microsoft. This is because my Digital Literacy is limited to basic tools such as PowerPoint. But throughout this course I was able to explore tools like Animoto.

Tools like Animoto and Prezi can contribute to building my knowledge by providing information in a fast and compressed format. For example, a 30 second Animoto slideshow can present new concepts and ideas to me very efficiently through pictures and texts. This way, if I find it interesting, I can do more research into it. So basically what presentation tools like Animoto and Prezi do is that they present a general concept of something and one can look into it if they find it intereting. This means I will not need to read pages and pages of an essay that does not interest me or is not relevant to my assignment. Because a quick slideshow presentation will be able to convey the general ideas to me in a summarized format.

Seyfang, M. Flickr. Link 

I came by an article this week that was related to the copyright theme of week 10. It was an article by the Columbus Dispatch that discussed a study based on figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The study showed that the U.S copyright industries contributed more than $1 trillion to the GDP.  From my readings in the "Your Digital Presence" article, I learned that things like literary work, artistic work, performer's performances and sound recordings are all copyrighted and protected by the law. This explains why such a large amount of money is generated by copyright works, because it includes things like video games, movies, books and newspapers. However, I think that this $1 trillion dollar amount could be even bigger if it was not Fair Dealing for Media Education, an article from my readings. This article discussed the idea of Fair Dealing, which is "certain rights to use copyrighted material without permission or license from the owner of the copyright". I found this concept quite intriguing as it lays out for what purposes and under what conditions one can claim the Fair Dealing rule. I think learning about what copyright is and what is copyrighted has really benefited my digital literacy and citizenship. In addition, learning about things like Fair Dealing will be beneficial to me educationally as I will now understand when I can use others' work without their permission. It has benefited my digital literacy and citizenship as a whole because now I have a greater understanding of the "rules" of the digital world. This is useful as I will now be able to safely and confidently use others' work while following the copyright rules without worrying about breaking the law. Plus I learned interesting things while reading the textbook, like that "anything that is produced by an individual is copyrighted whether they have gone through the legal process or not." (Ribble, M. (2011). Digital citizenship in schools (2nd ed.). Chapter 6. Eugene, Or.: International Society for Technology in Education.).

That's it for this week, thanks for reading! Understanding the concept of copyrights and the rules around it was quite an amount of content to swallow. Please join me in next week's post as I continue to explore the digital world!

Thank,

Billy

My Slideshow "Animoto"

I recently explored a digital tool called  Animoto This tool helps users create short slideshows using a combination of texts, images and music! Before this exercise, I never fully understood the implications of Creative Commons (CC) or Copyrights. Finding images on Flickr and posting them onto Animoto helped me reflect on what I am doing. That is, I was taking content created by others and using it in my own work. This made me wonder what kind of laws are involved in these actions. As I researched CC and Copyrights, I learned about what can be copied and what cannot and under what conditions. For example, in Flickr under "Additional Info", a link to the copyright details are provided. This allowed me to learn more about what is required to be referenced and what I am allowed to do with the specific image. This really contributed to my Digital Literacy and Citizenship for two reasons. Firstly, I improved my Digital Literacy because I always knew how to use Google Images, but I never knew you were able to search images using preferences related to copyright options. This will allow me to search for resources for a school project in the future without worrying if the resources displayed are allowed for sharing or editing as I can narrow my search results down with advanced preferences searching. Secondly, I learned that I must always reference a resource like an image when it is copyrighted by an author. This is part of being a good digital citizen and a good citizen in general as it is the law!


My Slideshow (Animoto). Images in the video are referenced as (same order as the video):

1. WikiMedia Commons. Retrieved November 23, 2013, from Flickr  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACreative_commons.jpg

2. Seyfang, M. Copyright Symbols. Flickr. Retrieved November 23, 2013, from
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/3020966500/

3. Casale, V. Handcuffs. Flickr. Retrieved November 23, 2013, from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/v1ctor/6711234961/

4. Vollmer, T. (2008, June 20). fair use classroom poster draft. Flickr. Retrieved November 23, 2013, from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixteenmilesofstring/2596569134/

Weekly Report & Reflection Post #9 - VoiceThread

It's finally week 9 of this very long journey of digital learning! This week I explored a tool called VoiceThread, it is very unique in the way it helps people collaborate. Voice Thread allows you to create slide shows and add comments to it. Of course it also allows other users who are signed in to also add comments to your slides if you so desire. However the uniqueness of VoiceThread is that you can leave your comment in not just text but also audio and video format. For me, that sounds really cool but also useful, which I will discuss below.

As I mentioned, VoiceThread allows you to leave audio or video comments on slides created by yourself or others. I think this will contribute to my learning as that will allow me to hear what others have to say about my work, quite literarily. It will help my learning because while others can leave text feedback, there are some things that are much better communicated verbally. By receiving a combination of text, audio and video comments on slides that I can create, I will be able to maximize the quality of my work. I think VoiceThread will fit very well into my PLE's Collaborating and Socializing category. This is because overall VoiceThread is truly a socializing and collaborating tool, it allows you to comment on others' work and also discuss them through the comments. I will be able to use this tool very effectively when I need to work with others for academic projects. I think this tool is similar to other collaborating tools in terms of the basic functions it can provide, that is it allows you to share work with others through the cloud. However what makes this tool different is the way you can communicate with others regarding the material you have shared. Adding audio and video as a medium of communication can enrich the learning process of participants.

Common Sense Media

This week I found an interesting article in my Feedly reader. It is an article that talks about an app called Digital Passport for Kids. The app has games that teach children how to be "safe, smart, and kind online". I think this game is really important as it addresses some crucial digital responsibilities and allows kids to expand their digital literacy. By teaching young children digital responsibilities like protecting one's privacy or being respectful online will go a long way for when they become adults. I strongly believe that by teaching young children early on in their life how to deal with the fast growing technologies of today will help protect them in the future and prevent any abuse of the technologies.

Thanks for reading this week's blog. Be prepared for more reflection from me in next weeks' blog on new digital tools that I will explore.

Technology Use Scenarios

Scenario 11: Mrs. Smith considers herself to be a pretty savvy computer user. She has been working with computers for five years and uses them regularly in class. Mrs. Smith gets an email from someone she does not know but opens the email anyway. When she opens it, the message has some advertisement for a free gift, so she deletes the email. Several days later she is working on her computer and notices that her Internet browser is working very slowly. She decides to check the computer with an antivirus program and discovers that she has a virus on her computer. She determines that the virus came from the email she received several days previously. 

Mrs. Smith appears based on the facts of the article be a very capable person in terms of technology use and digital know how. She used her digital technology both appropriately and inappropriately for several reasons. She used her email inappropriately because one should avoid opening emails from unknown senders as they may often contain viruses. This article talks about the different kinds of viruses that exist and how they can enter your computer. This website talks about the Worm Virus that is very commonly spread through emails. However the website does mention that in order for the virus to get into your computer you need to click a link or open an attachment. In general opening up these kinds of emails should not be a concern if you do not open links or attachments. Mrs. Smith took very appropriate actions when she noticed that her Internet browser was working slowly. Her use of the antivirus was correct as it lead her to determine the source of the virus. This website describes very well what an antivirus is and how it can help users detect viruses. 

Mrs. Smith could have opened the unknown email but avoided opening any links or attachments from the unknown sender. Also she could have altogether not opened the email but instead try to find out who the sender is. There are also softwares like this one that can detect email viruses.

Your Weekly Report & Reflection #8 - Wiki

Hey it's been a great week so far as I wrapped up my Google Docs collaboration project and explored wikis! Some of you may not know what a wiki is, it is a website that anyone can edit easily using a regular web browser. You have probably heard of the wiki called Wikipedia. It is one of the most used wikis in the digital world.

I can definitely see myself using a wiki on a daily basis. In fact, I am already using a wiki called Wikipedia on a daily basis. It is one of my first sources for information before I look anywhere else. I think one of the biggest concerns with wikis is that it can be changed by anyone! This means anyone can add false information to a wiki and viewers may take it as a fact. However from my experience with Wikipedia, I have not encountered any situations where there were false information in something I read. This is mainly because for every person who adds incorrect information to the wiki, there is a hundred or more people who are there to correct it immediately. Wikis are similar to some collaboration tools like Google Docs and Evernote, however they can also be very different. This is because while the fundamental idea of a wiki and Google Docs is for people to come together and work on a topic, the purposes and situation in where they are used are different. Many wikis like Wikipedia is designed for the mass public, meaning it is accessible and edible by anyone and everyone. However in many situations, tools like Google Docs are meant for a target audience, a select group of individuals and not for the world at large. I think wikis are a great source of information and a great way to contribute to a topic that you are knowledgable about for the world to see. While I think Google Docs is a great tool to collaborate with a limited number of people. At the end of the day, which tool you prefer really depends on what your intention with that tool is. Depending on the situation, your preference can easily change.

I think wikis are a great and effective tool for supporting learning. This is because wikis can be composed of thousands and even millions of individuals' minds. This allows information to be widely available as there many sources available to add into the wiki. However the issue with wikis is that it may not be always accurate, especially regarding controversial or complicated topics. Wikis can be used as a source of information, however I do not believe it should be used as a sole source of information. It should always be corroborated with other sources whenever possible. By doing this, one can support their learning very successfully with wikis as it will act as one of their many sources of information.

Stephen Morton for The New York Times

This week in my Feedly reader, I found an article about how the U.S government cut food stamps to those who are in need. This article's headline really caught my attention because while I understand there are many people in the world who rely on food stamps to survive, I did not think that so many of these people would be in the U.S. It was a huge shock to me to learn about how dependent some people are on food stamps and how high the poverty level is. It really makes me sad to learn that there are people starving in the U.S and with food stamp cuts in recent times, it will be even harder on them. As a result, this article makes me think twice about wasting food next time and it also made me appreciate how lucky some of us are to be able to have enough fresh food every day.

Thanks for reading as always, please stay tuned for next week!

Billy

Weekly Report & Reflection #7 - Google Doc it!

It's been a busy but exciting week as we kicked off the group collaboration project! I really enjoyed working with my group members and chatting on Todays Meet about our group project. What's really exciting about this project is that we don't actually meet, but we have to collaborately create a presentation online! Several years ago, this would not have been possible. But now, with cloud technology, people around the world can work together on anything without actually having to meet. One of the challenges of working on a project together through the digital world is sharing with each other your own work. Traditionally, emails would be used, however a tool created by Google called Google Docs via the Google Drive now allows group members to work on a single document or slide together at the same time!

Working with Google Docs was quite the pleasure. I love how I did not need to click save or click email or share. It was all done automatically! What was more fantastic about Google Docs is that our group can work on the same document or slide at the exact same time without any conflict. Another great benefit of Google Docs is that you can make Word like documents or PowerPoint like slide shows using Google Docs' built in software that does not require any installations. This means we had a vast amount of tools available to us when we were creating our presentation slides and all for free. This tool will be extremely useful for education activities in two ways. Firstly, I can access and create Word like documents anywhere I go and on any computer as long as I have an internet connection. Secondly, I can collaborate with my group mates easily on Google Docs because there is no need to email each other our works or worry about compatibility between a Mac Word and a Windows Word document. Exploring and learning about Google Docs has been a great help to my Digital Literacy. I thought I had great knowledge about online sharing tools but Google Docs really surprised me! Not to mention how much my Digital Communication will now be improved as I add Google Docs as a tool under my belt. My three ideas for using Google Docs in a classroom or professional environment  are the following. Firstly, it would be a great tool to use at school with group members or collaborators. Instead of working on different documents at different times, Google Doc will allow everything to be combined into one single document available virtually anywhere. Secondly, Google Docs can be used as a personal too at school when taking notes or jotting down thoughts. Instead of saving those notes on a USB or emailing it, Google Docs stores it in your account automatically. This means if you travel somewhere and forget your computer or USB, you can still access your documents online from a different device. Lastly, Google Docs will be a great tool for inside the work place! Like working on a school project, co-worker often share materials and resources while working together on a work project. This means you can easily share your work with a colleague who might be located in a different office or even different country! By working on the same documents together, you are able to keep track of what each member is doing and when at all times

              Image credit: Veer, Edutopia

This week through my Feedly Reader, I found an article about 5 questions teachers can ask students to help boost their learning experience. The questions suggested in this article are quite simple but "powerful" as suggested by the article. I think questions like "Why do your think that" or " How do you know this" will let teachers really reach into the minds of their students and try to help their students understand and further develop their train of thought on various topics. While you may have already thought about these questions, I believe keeping track of how often and when you ask these questions is very important. This allows you to be able to "routinely and relentlessly" ask these questions which will in turn help make your students more comfortable and confident when asking questions or communicating their opinions.

That's it for this week! As always thanks for reading and please stay tuned for next week's post as my group wraps up our presentation!

Thanks,

Billy

Weekly Report & Reflection #6 - Exploring Evernote

Hey everyone! This week I explored an online tool called Evernote.To put it simply, it is a tool to make notes. However it is really so much more than just that! "Notes" in Evernote is more than your traditional idea of a note. Notes in Evernote can be an image, voice memo, handwritten note and even a webpage. What Evernote does is simple yet powerful and extremely useful. It is the ultimate tool to stay organized in the Digital World.

Not only can you run Evernote on your traditional Windows PC computer, you can run it on OS X, iOS, Chrome OS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and webOS! It is amazing how many platforms you can integrate your Evernote across. This means if I create a note on my Macbook at home, I can edit and view it on my phone anywhere with an internet connection. This feature of cloud access and cross platform integration is my favourite part of Evernote. Of course Evernote is not just cool, but extremely useful for educational purposes. An example of this would be the reminder tool. This tool lets me set reminders on any note within my folder, it helps me keep track of when assignments are due or simply remind me that I need to start it right away! I often use this tool when I  am working on a project; I would create a note and write down ideas and links relevant to them, then I would set a reminder for next week to finish it up before the project is due. Another feature really useful for learning is the ability to share notebooks. This goes beyond the traditional idea of handing my physical notebook to a group member. It uses it's cloud system to allow multiple users to access a notebook in order to share ideas and collaboratively work on a single project. In fact, I am using it right now with my two group members, we are working on a project about Digital Literacy. My group partners have already created a shared note with possible sources we could use!

What's great about Evernote is that it fits so many needs and thus I believe it fits in more than one category within my PLE. Evernote can really be part of "Collaborating and Socializing" and "Organizing Content". This is because it not only organizes content that I have collected, it also helps me share it with others. I will definitely add Evernote to my PLE because as I previously mentioned, it is an extremely useful tool with everyday applications! Thanks to Evernote, I was able to bring my Digital Communication to another level. People usually think of cell phones or emails as Digital communication but Evernote is a form of indirect communication. It lets you share content with others as a form of communication without a single word being said! Of course this also means another point towards my Digital Literacy as learning about Cloud technology and online sharing/storage means I now have a better idea of sharing content online now works. It is so much more than just sending a person an email, our digital technology has evolved to a point where we put content in a box in the digital world and anyone in the world can access the box with our permission!

AllThingsD, Link to source

AllThingsD is a great website about digital technology that I subscribe too. It has anything from reviews to articles about all things Digital! I found this interesting article about how Google and Amazon are building these amazing office buildings of incredible architecture.  It really reminds me of this article I saw in my reader about the Apple campus they are building in the shape of a spaceship. And now apparently Amazon is building a campus with 3 giant sphere while Google is building a floating campus! Reading about this really makes me wish that I could work at Google or Amazon. Working for Google would however require a mother load of Digital knowledge and experience (good thing I am starting with this ADED class!). It makes me realize how knowledge about the Digital world is so important. Not will it only be useful in my education and day to day life, but it will be crucial for my career especially if I want to work for tech giants like Google or Amazon!

Anyways that's it for this week, thanks a lot of reading. Just remember to check out Evernote as it is a great tool for organizing and sharing materials across all platforms online!

Billy

Weekly Report & Reflection #5 - Tweet tweet

Hey everyone! Thanksgiving is officially over and I'm sure all those who celebrated this holiday is now stuffed with more than enough turkey. In this past week I created a Twitter account and explored how tweeting can help me enhance my educational experience. But before I talk about Twitter, I want to touch on my experiences on how I participated in learning from others in a personal learning network (PLN). Using various methods and channels of communication, I was able to discuss tools and topics that we have covered so far in our ADED class. I find it very interesting to be able to hear my peers' opinions and thoughts on various topics that I have previously discussed in my blog. Whether it's a comment they have left on something I wrote or new discovery they made themselves, I find myself looking from a completely new perspective. I must admit that I have learned quite a bit from my PLN. Just the other day, a classmate shared an interesting application for phones that I have never heard of but find quite useful. In addition, another classmate commented on something I posted online and shared a perspective quite opposite to mine but I still found it quite englightening as it was something I never thought of. Overall, I think learning and communicating with others in my PLN is one of the best learning experiences I have ever had and I hope to continue to explore new tools and ideas through it.

Twitter was quite a fascinating tool that I explored this week. Not only is it a tool for social purposes, it is also a great and informative tool for educational purposes. Whether you are interested in business, the arts or something like technology, there is always someone you can follow to get live updates of topics you are interested in. I like how twitter helps you discover new tools with it's discovery function. Based on your web searches and internet activity, it will present you tweets that may interest you. This takes customization to a whole new level! For example, if I was looking up the migration of whales online, twitter can link me up with groups such as WWF that cater to my interests. This is a great learning tool because if you are majoring in biology for example, you can follow influencial biologists on twitter in order to be one the first people to hear their thoughts and discoveries. You can also follow organizations like your university department in order to get updated on the most effective learning tools available to you provided these institutions.

University of Chicago; right, Tami Chappell/Reuters

Today, I want to share something I recently discovered on my Feedly Reader. This article in the NY
Times talked about 3 Professors who were awarded the noble prize in Economic Science. I found this article quite fascinating as it discussed how these professors showed that in the short term the financial market moved unpredictably but in the long term the market "moved by a mix of rational calculus and human behaviour". As an investor myself, this was very interesting as it will affect how I will handle my long term investments. Feedly has proved to be extremely useful to me as it provided me not only news of interest (like the iPhone 5S), but it also provided me very educational information like this one.

That's it for this week! I will continue to tweet through my twitter account @bwang00 so please follow me as I continue to explore our vast digital world and share all that I have learned with you. As always, thanks for reading and let's kick off week 6!

Thanks,

Billy

Weekly Report & Reflection blog post #4 - diigo it!

Hey everyone it's been a great week so far! I have a ton of information to share this week as I explored the world of bookmarking and tagging. Many people out there probably think that sounds silly! Bookmarking should be very straightforward and easy right? Well yes and no. This is because you can take your bookmarking to the next level with Diigo, an online organizational tool that helps collect and manage websites that you have bookmarked. Diigo is much more than a tool to bookmark websites though! It is a tool that can help me add sticky notes, highlight, share and tag things on my favourite websites! I really like the sticky note function in Diigo as it helps me add quick notes about things or keep a train of thoughts on a topic within any website that I have visited. This could help me academically by allowing me for example to write notes about about information that I am researching online directly on the website with the information. When I am researching how the accounting standards will affect depreciation, I can add a sticky note directly on the accounting standard website with my thoughts and I can come back anytime to that website for reference with my thoughts still there! The highlighting feature is also very useful; when reading the new accounting standard, I can highlight important points so that when I come back to it for reference, I do not need to read it all over again! Last but not least, tagging is also a very useful feature as it allows me to tag different websites and separate them into different categories that way. For example, I can tag all the technology related websites like Apple.com as "tech" and all the world news related websites as "news". This way, I can just search for a tag and find a list of all the websites that I have bookmarked related to that tag. I would definitely categorize Diggo in the "Organizing Content" category in my PLE. This makes a lot of sense as I think of Diggo as a great tool to organize all the contents I have collected on the internet.

Source: ChicagoAgent, http://chicagoagentmagazine.com/

An example of something I bookmarked this week is IAS 2. This stands for International Accounting
Standard 2. IAS 2 covers inventories, specifically how inventories should be measured, collected and presented on the financial statement. IAS 2 is very important to me as I not only use this as a reference for my accounting classes at Brock, but I also use this at work! By learning to use Diggo, my life was made much simpler to be honest. In addition to helping me bookmark the IAS 2 reference page (which allows me to access it with just a single click), it also helped me organize my thoughts on the page. Firstly, I was able to tag it as "accounting". This will be very useful as I start to collect dozens of bookmarks and when the time comes and I am in need of IAS 2 guidelines, I can simply search up accounting in the tags search bar. Secondly, I was able to highlight many important pages on the IAS 2 reference page with Diggo, this will allow me to refer to specific parts of IAS 2 that I often forget or use!

Anyways, that's it for this week! Learning about Diggo and other bookmark tools has really helped me out and will definitely save me time in the future! I hope you have been inspired by this post to take a peek at Diggo as I think it is a wonderful tool everyone can utilize. As always, thanks for reading and stay tuned for next week's post!

Billy

Weekly Report & Reflection Post #3 - The world of RSS Feeds

Hey everybody, it's been a great week so far as I explored the functionalities of RSS Feeds and tools like Feedly to help organize all my feeds. As I have mentioned in my last blog post this week, I used a tool called Feedly to help put all my RSS Feeds in one convenient location. This allowed me to skimp through many feeds and read the ones that really catch my eye!

Source: NY Times (Ben Wiseman)

Today, I want to share an interesting post from Study Successful that talks about a "7 Minute Workout" for the busy student. This post really caught my eye because it relates to my interests. This is because I am a busy student and I also enjoy working out. After reading the article, I learned a set exercises that I can do within 7 minutes (rest time included!). How great is that! A simple diagram to the right illustrates what these exercises are. I will find these exercises extremely useful on days when I do not have time to go to the gym. What makes this even better is that all you really need is gym clothes and a chair!

Thanks to RSS feeds and Feedly, I have now added another great tool that will not only enhance my learning but also my physical health. RSS Feed Readers have really contributed to my digital literacy because it has helped explore websites and blogs that I would not have found or done so myself. For example, Feedly lead me to a great article in the Study Successful blog and through the blog I was lead to a more detailed article in the NY Times. So what RSS Feed Readers does for me is that it helps me navigate the digital world in directions that connect to my interests. In a way, it can also be said that RSS Feeds contribute positively to my Digital Health & Wellness. How is this possible you might ask? Well, if you think about it, RSS Feeds save me the time of going through numerous websites and spending hours in front of a computer browsing content in order to find ones that interest me. This negatively impacts me in a physical manner (spending too much time on the computer) as it can affects me ergonomically  and may lead to me building up stress. But as I learned to use RSS Feeds, my search for content relevant to me was made much easier. Now I can just log in to one website (Feedly) and content that might interest me are all displayed on one page in a summarized fashion.

As you may remember, last week I discussed PLEs. My PLE diagram consisted of four sections: Organizing Content, Collaborating and Socializing, Synthesizing and Creating and Practicing Digital Responsibility. I believe RSS Feeds fit very well into the Organizing Content section. As tools like Feedly do exactly that! They extract and organize RSS Feeds into one location. This helps me avoid going into dozens of websites to find content that interests me.

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you will join me next week as I continue to explore tools in the digital world!

Billy

My Experience with RSS Feeds! - Dipping my toes into the world of RSS Feeds.

Hey everyone, this week I experimented with RSS Feeds! An RSS feed, also known as Rich Site Summary, "uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, video" according to Wikipedia. Along with the RSS feed, I also created a Feedly account which I use to organize my RSS feeds. Feedly helps me organize all my interests like technology, world news and business all in one convenient location.

One blog I frequently visit is iPhoneinCanada. It covers all Apple related news from a Canadian perspective. I really like this blog because it is Canadian; many non-Canadian blogs are from the U.S and as a result much of the information on it proves to be irrelevant for Canadians. I choose an article from this blog related to the new iMac that was just released. So the new 2013 iMac is equipped with the Intel’s Haswell processor which I think will be amazing! I am a huge Apple fan in case you haven't noticed, but I have yet to own a iMac. The 3.1GHz processing is quite tempting, but at a price tag of over $1300, I think I will wait a few more years for when I have a job that will allow that kind of budget. Again, the new iMac looks incredibly beautiful and I would definitely jump at it if the price tag was not a king's ransom! However if you happen to be more fortunate, I highly recommend this beautiful piece of technology made by Apple!

Exploring the PLE (Personal Learning Environment)

Where do I want to be in 10 years? Who do I want to be in 10 years? These have been the questions often asked of me by my mentors, friends and even myself. As of now, I would like to see myself working in the audit industry at the current firm I am interning at. I would like to be a CPA designation holder and also a CFA designation holder so that I may venture more into the finance world if my passion so desires. Where I currently stand is on the road towards this 10 year goal; I am an accounting student aspiring to become a CPA who is on the verge of graduating within the next year.  I believe I will miss school and will be very sad to leave. I will miss the social events, many of my friends and believe or not, going to school! However, I am mentally prepared for the challenges ahead of me as I prepare to complete the CPA designation exams. At the same time, I believe I will need to improve many aspects of myself in order to reach my goals in the next 10 years. One of the things I would like to see myself improve from my current self would be my communication skills. I aim to be able to be more outgoing and be better at expressing ideas in a clear and concise manner. Online resources like this Harvard Blog will be a key to helping me improve things like my communication skills. In fact, digital resources like the Harvard Blog will be a new addition to my Personal Learning Environment (PLE) as I set out to improve myself and stretch my horizons in the digital world. PLE will actually be my next topic of discussion, but before I get into that, I would like to discuss how I can improve my learning environment.  W. Clement Stone (businessman, philanthropist and New Thought self-help book author) once said:

"You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success - or are they holding you back?"

I strongly believe Stone's quote is very accurate, I constantly try to hammer out factors in my environment that hold back my learning. An example of this would be noise. My roommates can be quite noisy at times, as a result I change my environment by continuing my studies at the school library. Another example of how I can improve my environment would be to obtain a computer in my own room. This allowed me to have some personal space while I worked on school assignments and as a result allowed me to concentrate better.


What is a PLE? It stands for Personal Learning Environments. Wikipedia defines it as "systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning". Examples of many PLEs can be found here. In fact, Wikipedia can be part of someone's PLE; it is part of mine! I used my first computer in elementary school, which was a macintosh. I also own an iPhone which is loaded with many applications that help me socialize, collaborate, organize and create various types of contents as part of my learning process. This is of course also true for my mac. However, what I didn't realize is that all these applications I use daily on either my iPhone or Mac all contribute to create my PLE. Thus I categorized my PLE into four sections which are Organizing Content, Collaborating and Socializing, Synthesizing and Creating and Practicing Digital Responsibility. These categories were taken from a poster created by Drexler (2010). The reason for choosing these categories was because this is how I see my usage of the digital world. It is separated into categories that all contribute to how I learn. Each category on my PLE contains logos of the tools I use daily to help enhance my learning process. For example, in the organization category I have a note taker app that I use on my iPhone. This app allows me to write down for example, notes of spontaneous ideas for a school project. Next in the collaborating category, I have Gmail. This email platform allows me to send messages to peers regarding collaborative efforts and it also allows us to share contents instantly. The digital responsibility category is probably one of the most important. The contents in this category like the Web Block app allows me to remain a good Digital Citizen by helping steer clear of unwanted websites in order to remain safe in the digital world. Last but not least, the creating category is probably one of the most used sections of my PLE. Softwares like Microsoft Office allows me to create anything from school essays to resumes which will help me further my career and learning process.

However in order to do this I need to update and maintain my PLE. Because at the moment I have a very limited PLE. In order to expand my PLE I will explore regularly the tools available to me for learning, new ways to stay organized, stay active in the digital world and keep sharing regardless of where I am in life. I believe that adapting to my environment will help me learn even better. I can do this by staying on top of technology and digital tools that may enhance learning. I can also find ways to change my physical environment by experimenting with different setups of tools in my learning environment in order to maximize my learning experience. I plan to continue to explore the digital world through this Learning in Digital Contexts class while maintaining a positive digital footprint.

In addition to a PLE, I also created a word cloud of last week's blog post using Gliffy. The words footprint and digital appear to be the most noticeable. Which makes sense because that was the theme of last week's post. The word cloud is interesting because it really highlights the main ideas and themes of a story. This would be a great tool to get an impression of a story or just to obtain a general idea of what the story is about. Also, it looks really cool and I love the colours!




That's it for week 2 everyone! As always, thanks for reading! I hope you follow me through the next few months while I share my learning experiences and tools along with a personal reflection of how I am adapting to the fast changing digital world!

Reflection Post 1 - My footprint in cyberspace

Do you want a digital question? I don't think that's a question easily answered. Truthfully, I don't think you have a choice (unless you live in the woods!). But for many of us who don't live in the woods and own an electronic device that connects us to the digital world (especially in Canada), we almost certainly leave a digital footprint. I think it's too late for me to think about whether I "want" to  leave a digital footprint, but instead I am embracing it and hopefully using my digital footprint to my advantage. Leaving a "positive" digital footprint can be key to landing that job I've always wanted or  just leaving a good impression for anyone out searching my name! So yes I do want a digital footprint, but I want it to be "positive" and I want it to work to my advantage.

One might ask: what is a "positive" digital footprint? Well, every piece of information you have ever left on the internet has contributed to your digital footprint. An image of you posing as superman on Facebook, a tweet about how awesome Apple products or even this blog post will all contribute to your footprint. A positive footprint will share your good points, your creativity, talent, skills and personality. By sharing these points, you may create a professional image of yourself (if that's what your going for) that can show potential employers why you can fit in their organization. At the end of the day, a positive digital footprint will help you communicate indirectly with others about who you are in a positive light.



After obtaining an understanding of what a positive digital footprint is and what it can do for you, you are probably wondering how you can obtain and maintain a positive footprint. One example of how you can do this specifically addressing Twitter is discussed in the video to the right. The video taught me 2 important things:

1. Think before you share
2. Protect and maintain your privacy

And I think the suggestions made in this video really address the issues of maintaing a positive footprint. It helped me understand that in order to maintain a positive footprint, you have to take initiative to attempt to share with only people you want to share with and more importantly think of the consequences before sharing. By keeping in mind of these simple rules, you can protect your privacy and maintain the positive digital footprint that you would like your future employer to see!

It's finally time for me to obtain my digital citizenship by completing the Digital Driver's Licence Exam in a book called Digital Citizenship in School by Mike Ribble! I've always hated exams, but this was an exception as I scored a 18 out of 20, which is quite high by my standards for any exam! Regardless, I did not score perfect, meaning I still have much to learn about digital citizenship. The two questions I answered incorrectly were numbers 3 and 4, regarding electronic exchange of information. Perhaps I need to gain a better understanding of the appropriate digital channels of communication for different reasons. In Ribble's book, he highlighted nine important elements of digital citizenship, I won't list them here but you can find it in chapter 2 of his book. However, I do want to talk about one element that really stood out for me, which was Digital Commerce. I found the section regarding Digital Commerce fascinating as I am a regular consumer online with regular visits to online retailers such as eBay, Amazon and BR. I think it is important for me to become an informed and careful online consumer because being "an intelligent consumer is an important aspect of good citizenship" (Ribble, Mike. Digital citizenship in schools). 

Well that's it folks! In this week's reflection,  I discussed my thoughts towards digital footprints and how they can affect our everyday lives. I hope you enjoyed this post and as always, thanks for reading!

Billy

All about me!

Hey everyone, my name is Billy Wang and I am a fourth year accounting student at Brock University. During my free time, I like to play squash and badminton with my friends at Brock's athletic facilities. I am also very active as I enjoy regular morning runs and spin classes in the Zone at Brock. In the past few years, I have been very active in my community. Some of my involvements included participating in the annual CN Tower climb for the United Way; I have also participated in several charity runs organized by Scotia bank, CIBC and GoodLife Fitness.

Although I do enjoy a variety of physical activities, I also like to spend a fair amount of time on video games; one of my favourite PC games is Total War: Rome. In addition, I own a PS3 which I occasionally play, some titles I own include Battlefield, CoD Black Ops and GTA. Apart from video games, I enjoy a variety of music including Rap, Hip-pop, Classic Rock, Classical and Jazz! My favourite male artists range from James Blunt to Jay-Z and even Frank Sinatra. On the other hand, I absolutely love female artists like Kelly Clarkson, Whitney Houston and Ella Fitzgerald.

Growing up in the digital age where technology has moved incredibly fast than it ever has provides countless amounts of opportunities to embrace technology and use it to my advantage ,whether I am at school or work. However, with all these new technologies and innovations, it is important to understand the idea of digital citizenship and digital footprint. Because what one chooses to do on the inter web will affect one's digital citizenship and leave a unique digital footprint. This is why I have chosen to take ADED 1P32, an education course in digital citizenship. Through this course, I hope to become familiarized in effectively and ethically using digital tools for lifelong learning and development. Furthermore, I believe this course will help me understand the benefits of using digital technology, articulate an understanding of Canadian digital laws and principles of digital citizenship.

I hope you enjoyed reading my first blog and I will end it with a quote:

"My own experience is use the tools that are out there. Use the digital world. But never lose sight of the need to reach out and talk to other people who don't share your view. Listen to them and see if you can find a way to compromise."

Colin Powell

 Thanks for reading!

 Billy