HRigdon EME Blog

 

 

Personally, in the time we have spent distance learning I have experienced academically my highest highs and lowest lows. At times, distance learning has been supremely demoralizing as there is so little to no meaningful peer engagement, leaving students feeling very isolated. On the other hand, distance learning has allowed a degree of freedom from the normal, hard-and-fast schedules in which we often find ourselves. During no other time have we been able to roll over five minutes before class to login to a Zoom lecture, saving use the time, hassle, and stress of commuting and going in-person to class. As a teacher, I would take notes from a prior professor of mine, and offer evening, online hang-out sessions for students. My professor hosted several movie nights--sometimes relating to class content, sometimes not--and other times just left the Zoom meeting open for conversation about anything  and everything. Much less formal than office hours, this promoted peer engagement amongst s

I, personally, loved working on the Web Design assignment as I love anything that involves creativity. That does not mean the assignment was not without its ups and downs however. For me, it took quite a bit of trial-and-error to learn how best to format my website--how to change the theme color and fonts, how to alter the layout of the pages, how to properly format pictures as background. Google and a Weebly support board were my best friends. After I was more well-versed (and after several huge failures) I began to thoroughly enjoy the platform and can see myself utilizing Weebly as a class webpage should I need one. The link to my homepage is:  https://hrigdoneme2040.weebly.com While I can appreciate the ability to annotate any text while on almost any web page, I have found Diigo more a hinderance than a help. In my future classroom, I would most likely utilize Diigo for students to share resources during research opportunities--linking to different journals and articles they find

From the several school websites I visited, I noticed that class announcements, student resources, and class calendars were among the links and pages available for public view. While some of the class pages featured teacher introductory pages, it was not the majority which I would appreciate as a parent. I imagine if I were a parent or student of the school myself, I may have special access to different ways to contact the teacher (email, phone, etc) or perhaps additional class resources such as ways to contact student peers, class readings, or more in depth calendars may be available. After doing a little research, I found a slew of productivity applications for use by teachers that featured several I could foresee myself using in my future classroom.   One of which is the app, Remind , which allows for real-time communication between a whole group or with just a single person. What I also like about Remind  is the, as the name suggests, remind function which assist students and paren

While I have held a personal Twitter account since early 2014, I never considered the more professional side of the social media platform. Since beginning my educational/professional Twitter account I have interacted with several different educational accounts such as FSUEducation (@fsueducation), Teacher2Teacher (@teacher2teacher), and WeAreTeachers (@WeAreTeachers). The FSU education account tweets about different opportunities for FSU education students to further their education, the successes of former students, and other College of Education events. Their most recent tweet was a call to any prospective graduate level students to tune into a Zoom interesting meeting for FSU's graduate school. As I have been contemplating graduate school for some time, I found this very helpful. The other accounts provide resources, articles, and sometimes just humorous posts to help educators in their day-to-day lives. The digital divide is a term used to describe the disparity in ease of acce