Information fluency is the is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically. In other words, knowing where to find information on the internet, assess it’s reliability, and use it appropriately.
Information fluency is important to many different people for different reasons. Teachers find information fluency essential when integrating technology into the classroom. There are internet ethics that the students must be aware of before you can set them free to surf the net. It can be beneficial to take the time to go over the aspects of information fluency with your students so they know:
how to find what they are looking for. Knowing which sites are reliable and which ones aren’t is important to understand when compiling information for a research paper. Go over which sources are considered scholarly (i.e. .edu, .org or .gov- all typically academic).
how to use information in an ethical manner. Students should understand that the internet is not a place to ridicule others or post anything offensive.
However, students aren’t the only ones that benefit from lessons in information fluency. It is a skill almost everyone can benefit from.
I really enjoyed participating in an educational Twitter chat it was a great experience. At first I was a little overwhelmed because it was hard to keep up with all the new tweets coming in. But then I realized that it wasn’t an entire conversation flowing that quickly but certain individuals responding to each others tweets. This eased my mind considerably so I chose an individual who had said something I found interesting and agreed with, and tweeted back to them.
I was anxiously awaiting a response but I didn’t get one for whatever reason. So I started to respond to other people’s tweets in hopes that someone would strike up a conversation with me, no such luck. However, twitter chats are interesting to watching to say the least. I participated in #edchat, and the focus was mainly on student and teachers and their relationship with technology. I was kind of disappointed when no one responded back to me because I actually felt I had material to contribute that would have enhanced the conversation. Regardless it was a great experience!
I think one of the most important points that is made in this article about Online Collaboration is the mention of an agreement. Having students collaborate online can be extremely helpful especially when you would like to cover other important material in class instead of dedicating it to group work. But the question is, when students collaborate online, how do you know that all of the group members are participating and contributing?
GoogleDocs are a helpful way to track who in the group is doing what. Every time a student makes a change to the document it will alert you as to who is making the change and what they have changed. Of course in order for that to be effective, the group must share their document with you.
However, there will always be that student who goes above and beyond to complete the assignment early and sometimes that involves taking on the brunt of the responsibility. This can be avoided by drafting an agreement between group members. The draft will include who will do what, and by what time. Hopefully this keeps the responsibility evenly distributed and on track. There is room for alterations within the agreement as well, but only if the whole group agrees to it.
For our assignment to create a radio show using garageband, my group and I chose vacation spots as our topic. This was broad enough that we could incorporate multiple elements into our show such as a newscast about the weather, a personal aspect where callers talked about their favorite vacation spots, informative sections on the specific vacation spots we chose to focus on, and tropical reggae music to set the mood. I really enjoyed creating all of these aspects and we would all get excited when we came up with another idea that we thought was good and we figured out where to place it that made the most sense.
When my group and I were creating this radio show through garageband, we had some technical difficulties but most of all we had fun. My favorite part was the bloopers. We mentioned creating an outtakes portion where we just meshed together all of the parts where we messed up and added background music to make it flow nicely. We never got around to it but by the time we finished creating this podcast I found myself wanting to be a radio show host. It was a great learning experience and a fun assignment!
I’m pretty new at the recording process. However, even though I know I’m not that great at it, I still chose to complete the daily create assignment asking me to record a video of me writing my favorite movie line. I also added music from the movie and Patrick Swayze actually saying the line I chose. I chose to incorporate these elements to give the video authenticity because my video turned out backwards. I tried to reverse it but I couldn’t figure it out.
I downloaded a new program to edit my videos called Camtasia, it’s really user friendly and made the process of producing my video extremely enjoyable. If you need a free video editing program I definitely recommend it!
This assignment was one of the more fun assignments I’ve done. I really liked how we were asked to play around with different accents, that made the creation process really entertaining for me and for everyone else in my house. I tried to do my best British impersonation however I’ll let you be the judge of my attempt at Ordering With an Accent.
I chose this assignment because I’ve been working with picky customers for six years now as a part of my job, so I know what it’s like to be on the other end of these insane requests. For once it was nice to be the one requesting them!
I absolutely love this picture of my best friend Mel and I. It just takes me back to freshman year of school when we had so little to worry about. The leap in this picture is so carefree and indicative of the life we used to live before we decided to grow up. This picture was actually taken about a year ago when she came to visit me at school. Mel and I met freshman year because we lived on the same floor and we have been friends ever since. Unfortunately she transferred out of Cortland midway through our sophomore year so I don’t see her nearly as much as I’d like to anymore!
I had fun with this assignment, however, I found myself regretting the program I used to create it as I tried to save it in a format that would allow me to open it in this post. I used Microsoft Powerpoint to create my poster detailing what’s “inside of me”. I found it interesting to play around with the speech bubbles and different options for the arrows as well.
When I originally formatted the poster, it was too large to even be saved as a powerpoint slide however there was no way to know that my image was too large and when it finally did save, it cut off the sides of my poster, making the text I included illegible. So I then had to play around with the sizing of my background picture, and the text I included to fit to a smaller screen.
