Blog Post #4

     My early experiences with social media include using apps such as Instagram to learn new things about the news or skills. These contributed to my Personal Learning Network in many different ways through giving me videos to watch that were engaging and short-form content which allowed me to gain a large amount of information in short amount of time. One skill that I remember using social media for a lot was learning American Sign Language. I followed many Deaf or HOH creators who signed within their videos and the captions associated with them allowed me to pick up a lot of the language. This skill in particular is very helpful in my future classroom in order to speak to children who may be HOH or non verbal. Instagram, and social media in general, can be helpful in finding tips for situations I may endure in the classroom that other teachers have experienced in their past. 

    Growing up, my classrooms did not include technology until middle school. All of my materials were hands-on and in person which helped me gain a good understanding of content before involving technology. Once technology was introduced it was a very digitally rich environment. Many of my assignments were due online as well as many readings and videos were used to compliment the instruction in class. This continued within high school keeping most of my education digitally rich and mostly technology based. This all prepared me very well for the digitally rich college environment. I now have enrolled in some fully online classes and my experience with technology in the classroom have helped me to adjust to that new learning environment. 

    In my past, I have used Google Docs as great tool for collaborative writing and social annotation due to its comment and suggestion tools. This was extremely helpful in proofreading and revising writing as well as keeping notes on assigned documents and texts. In my classroom the students will be very young and may not understand this technology but I believe that it could be a great tool for older students or even teachers when developing lesson plans. An example of a lesson that I would use this software on is an inter-curricular project encompassing many different teachers and subjects. By having a shared doc with many of the teachers we would be able to share our lesson plans on the topic and show the different areas of the subject we would each cover. We can also annotate the other teachers lesson plans in order to build a more collaborative and seamless plan overall. This would allow the students to learn better and grasp a concept overall.