Homework Week 3:Twitter

This week I’m using twitter to try and find information on the latest craze, the balance board aka the hover board. My son wants one for Christmas and I want to know spending at least £250 on a piece of plastic on wheels is worth it! Using the hashtag BalanceBoard I found plenty of advertisement for it and several companies trying to sell their stock via Twitter using videos and offering discount, but it’s hard to find specifications. The price of a balance board varies widely, but unfortunately using Twitter, I can’t find what the most expensive ones have to offer that the cheaper ones don’t for them to justify the price difference and I’ll have to find that information elsewhere. If I looked elsewhere such as google, I’d probably get all the information in one place.

https://twitter.com/GadgetGaddict/status/652592646033145856

Social media is obviously very popular amongst teenagers and I believe Twitter could be a modern tool used for educational purposes such as tweets from teachers reminding the class and their parents about assignment deadlines or to remember their p.e kit. It could be used to keep parents informed whilst their children are on school trips or even to produce a mathematical graph using trends. If Twitter is not already widely used in schools I’m sure it will be in the near future.

Twitter is also used in higher education as method of research. Twournal Of was the world’s first twitter only academic journal and although some might be sceptical

“Studies show how tweeting out papers and research findings can boost citation count” (Miah, 2014)

Although it probably isn’t the first place I’d look to do any research, I will keep an open mind about it and will probably use it in the future to see if it can be useful to my studies.

Miah, A. (2014) Twitter journal: would you shareyour original research on social media?. Available at:http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/jan/27/twitter-only-journal-academic-research(Accessed: 20 October 2015).

Homework Week 2: YouTube

This week Steffano set us the task of viewing three topics to learn about using YouTube videos, here are the three topics I chose.

I searched how to make a fishtail braid because my mam has really long hair down to her waist and likes me to experiment with it sometimes. I chose to watch this video by Beautyklove dated 16/03/12, because the girl has similar length hair to my mam. To start off, the video is a little annoying because there's a lot of background noise and its a little slow getting to the actual tutorial.Once she got going it was easy to follow, clear how to to do a fish tail braid but a little to repetitive verbally.

The second video I watched was 'why do onions make you cry' by Intrgueology dated 9/02/13. I chose this video because cartoons look more appealing than watching someone talk whilst cutting an onion! I liked it's simplicity and humour, it was straight to the point with no distractions. I can't really find fault with this video other than maybe it went a little to quick between slides but I now know the answer to my question and know how to avoid crying when chopping an onion so I'm happy!

Finally the third video I watched was Microsoft Excel Tutorial for Beginners by Motion Training uploaded on 15/04/08. I find people either love or hate excel. My partner raves about it and thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread, basically because it does everything for you which means less work for him! Others say its boring and you might think of all the subjects in the world why would I chose to learn about this but I'm glad I did. After watching this easy tutorial, I've realised anyone can use excel for anything, even to calculate how much you spend on clothes every month! Although I probably won't do that or I'll be divorced before I'm married! Really like this video, very easy to follow and listen to as it's very informal.

Homework Week 1: Blog Posts

This week we were given a task of finding learning blogs and pick three blogs we thought were best and evaluate them. These are what I’ve found.

Steve Wheeler’s blog titled “learning with‘e’s” means the guy must have a sense of humour right? I had a look at his Danger Illustrated blog on October 2^nd 2015 because it was about critical thinking. He says that students struggle with it and I can definitely relate to that! He gives an example of how to critically analyse a bottle of water, he gives ideas that I certainly wouldn’t have thought of but he says there are “endless possibilities” to critical analysis, but to really help us students, a few more examples would have been great! However I’ll probably use this blog to remind me how to be a critical thinker in the future!

The second blog I read/ watched was by Cathy Moore dated 21^st July 2013. I like the title to her blog, “let’s save the world from boring training” if only all education sectors and employers thought the same eh! She’s made a short video on how to improve training and although it’s good, it’s not for the slow reader. I wouldn’t call myself a slow reader but even I had to pause and rewind! On the whole she has great ideas on using different ways to teach, like she says we don’t all learn the same way.

Finally I enjoyed reading Craig Weiss’ blog it ‘bothers me-what about you?’ dated 4th August 2015. This blog is something most of us can relate to. Amongst other things he tells us how it bothers him how once you sign up for something that’s “free” you end up getting a bunch of marketing calls, emails and newsletters that you didn’t ask for. It’s true, I signed up for online bingo once, and now I’m inundated with offers to join casinos and other gambling websites, I’m sure they do a good job of keeping gamblers anonymous going! So I liked that I could relate to some of this blog but he uses a lot of abbreviations that I can’t work out, I don’t know if it’s me that thick or him showing off!