Acquiring New Skills

        Hello all! Here's the eighth blog post of the year! Today, the blog will be discussing some new skills and experience I've gained in creating a web design with the Weebly program, as well as the skills and experience I've gained with Diigo. Additionally, I  am going to talk about a website that helps me stay on top of technological innovation for education in order to help me further my professional development.

     I have had experience with web design in the past, but this is the first time I used the Weebly program to create and design a website. This past week I used Weebly in order to design and create a teacher's class page, which included information such as a personal bio, announcements, calendar events, etc. I also included resources for the students and their parents, such as educational games. It's helped me understand all that goes into creating and up keeping a classroom page, as well as designing with color schemes and images. One of my least favorite parts of this task was the lack of ease to edit things on Weebly. Specifically, arranging and organizing the information on the pages was unnecessarily difficult, and the task of moving text blocks and images could've been more simple. Otherwise, with a bit of time, the rest of the website was easy to figure out. You can find the link to my webpage here.

    Diigo is a resource I'm continually using and gaining more experience in. It serves as a great resource to interact and share information with both my classmates and my teacher. One of the new skills I've learned by using Diigo is to annotate websites and create sticky notes on those pages for others to view. For my future use of it, it can serve as a great way to communicate with my co-workers and boss in order to easily share resources and information to each other. It is definitely something I would share and recommend to any of my older students to use. 

    One part of being in the education profession is being in the loop on any technological innovation on education that can be useful. This helps both yourself, with making tasks easier or furthering your skill as a educator, and for your students, who get more exposure to advanced technology and skills as well as a teacher who uses them to better the classroom experience. One way to keep up to date is to check different websites that post articles with the recent innovations. One such article can be found on eLearning Industry, where they posted an article called Top Educational Technology Trends in 2020-2021. Here you can find some of the up and coming innovations, and get some ideas of technology you can incorporate into your classroom.