Our Digital Selves and Us reflection

While watching the Our Digital Selves and Us the speaker asked us to think about the following questions: Is there a clear demarcation between who you are online and elsewhere? What parts of you are people missing out on if they do not interact with the online you? Why (or why not) should you manage your own personal cyber infrastructure? What does this mean to you? Who are we in this space where the online world is not something distinctly separate? To start with the first question, the answer is no. I really don't think there is much of a change or difference between who i am online and who i am in real life. I really try to be myself online, and i don't act any different. It helps because i am friends online with people i know in real life, so i don't have to change or be any different with them. For the second question, i don't really think people are missing a huge part of me if they don't interact with me online. I like talking to people and getting to know them in person. Though, the pictures i post online kind of allow people to know what i do at home and where i go on day to day basis. The pictures can kind of help people know me better because it allows them to see who i am when i'm not at school. For the third question, yes, i think it's important to manage your cyberinfrastructure online. It's good to keep up with your online profiles. For the final question, in the cyber world, we are still ourselves. We should still be the same person we are in real life, because people trust other people, and it's not right to not be honest and lie about who you are online. Overall, even though we have lots of ourselves online, we should still be who we are.

Learning Analytics and customization video

This is the link to my Learning Analytics and customization video that i posted on Flatclassroom and youtube. http://youtu.be/OvD6HJjcKFY

How is continued communication in various ways important for this project

Communication, as we all know, is very important for many things. It is especially very important for this project! The one thing that we have to do for this project, though, is continue to communicate. Why? This project involves the creation of a wiki and requires extensive research to obtain good and reliable information. We also collaborate with people from all over the country and the world. Communication is a REALLY BIG DEAL, and to be able to pull it off and have each group create a reliable wiki, we have to continue to communicate to each other. Each group has to use teamwork, and in order to have effective teamwork, communication is needed. Continued communication is needed especially. Because each person in each group has a certain job or thing they have to do to help the team, each team member must communicate to each other. Continued communication will allow the group to decide "who does what" and help with corrections and decisions the group has to make. This will help get work done. There are very many different ways that each team member can communicate to eachother without being close though! They can contact each other via email. The netgen flatclassroom ning also allows messaging. Facebook is also a site that can be used too. Diigo is also a good place to help communicate to people. Cell phones have texting and calling, which is another option, and Skype allows video chats. The internet is full of sites that help with communication, and technology today is always full of ways for communication too.

How Diigo can help improve collaboration

Diigo is a very usefull site that can help us save websites on the computer. What's best about it is that it can be accessed over the internet, and the internet, as we all know, can be accessed from anywhere in the world! Anyone, ANYWHERE can get on Diigo and use it, and thats why Diigo makes collaboration so easy and simple! Diggo allows us to share our work with groups of other people on Diigo, so we can choose who we want to see it. This makes collaboration and the sharing of information so much easier. Another great thing about Diigo is that it saves things for you! You can share your thoughts over the internet, and the people who you allow to see your bookmarks can view that. Everyone who has a Diigo can look at it and comment on what you said, and that ultimatly can help you. It also allows for back and forth communication, so you can discuss things with your group over Diigo. Diigo also alows you to highlight things. You can highlight things in text that you think will be helpful for your group. It helps your group locate the important information and narrows down the things you need. The biggest way, though, that Diigo really helps with collaboration is the fact that anyone in your group anywhere in the world can view it whenever they want. You aren't restricted to certain timezones and the information will always be there for whoever want to look at it. So overall, Diigo really is a very helpful web tool when it comes to collaboration. It's trustworthy and efficient and makes collaboration fun and easy.

How can Learning Analytics improve education?

A common trend for the netgen is learning analytics. Learning analytics is basicly observing data about students performance in school and using that to predict how they will do in the future. One major thing that leraning analytics leads to is customization, or forming a learning method around the student so they can ultimately learn better. Customization is a major step up in teaching. By looking at students past results, teachers can formulate the best way to teach the student. For example, if a teacher finds that most of the kids in a class react better and work better when the teacher shows them things rather than tells them how to do them, she might conclude that the majority of the class are visual learners. She could then customize how she teaches around the students, and might involve more visual things so they can learn better. Schools use learning analytics all the time. Our school, Pleasant Plains is an example! According to https://sites.google.com/site/week12socialanalytics/learning-analytics , schools can " measure overall performance through students’ performance on state standardized tests." We take standardized tests all the time. We take the ISAT, Explore, and PLAN. Teachers use the information and scores from those tests to figure out what the best way to teach us is. So, Pleasant Plains is just one of many schools that uses learning analytics to improve education!