Chapter 5 of The Connected Educator

       Chapter five of The Connected Educator discusses in great detail different tools to help professionals with communicating, documenting and social networking.  This chapter listed many great websites that can help enhance one's ability to learn and collaborate with others.  Creating a good online presence can help people seem more attractive to potential employers.  By taking advantage of websites and tools such as blogs to share knowledge and learn from others it can help build digital footprints.  The text listed several tools for documenting and archiving learning such as social bookmarking and the websites Delicious and Diigo.  The tool that I personally found most intriguing was the Diigo website, because it seemed to have the most useful features.  Diigo has basic features that allow learners to stay organized online by tagging interesting webpages and articles.  It also allows individuals to communicate with others that have similar interests, that might have more information on a desired subject.  Diigo goes above and beyond by allowing users to annotate and highlight articles through their website.  I think being able to have annotations directly on a source can be very helpful in keeping organized.  The website also allows users to collaborate with others and share their annotations with one another.

     The text also provides a list and description of different tools and websites that help allow for effective connecting and collaborating.  Collaborating with others around the world is a topic that has been discussed throughout The Connected Educator, because of its benefits for learning.  The first set of tools discussed were blogs, which allow for individuals to upload their own thoughts, while still allowing for feedback and discussion within the comments.  There are different forms of blogs, such as the Edublog, which is particularly for educators to communicate with parents and students all in one place.  Everyone involved with the group can access important information and interact with each other all in one place.  RSS Readers and Google Readers are two tools that help learners stay organized online.  RSS helps to bring useful blogs and webpages to the user, by skimming through sources and providing the best ones to their users.  Google Readers allows their users to stay organized by having all their blogs saved to the cloud through their account.  This helps people stay more organized and up to date with their favorite sites by getting emails all through their Google account.

     Tools such as Twitter, TeacherTube, Google Docs and podcasts were also discussed within the text and seem like more appealing and relevant tools to younger generations.  A lot of young adults are able to learn from others through social media apps such as Twitter.  This app allows people around the world to connect and interact with each other by sharing information publicly and privately.  Hashtags are a great way to research a more specific category to narrow down the type of information one is looking to learn more about.  Podcasts are another way to learn, rather than reading or gathering material visually, this allows for audio learning.  Podcasts tend to be more convenient and appealing because they can be listened to anywhere or on the go.  This chapter was very useful in providing a list of different tools that can be used in my future career path.  It is important within the business marketing field to stay up to date with current trends within the market place and to stay organized.  Blogs and social media sites such as Twitter are great tools for connecting with professionals in the same field and learning more about my profession.  After reading through Chapter five what tools did you find to be the most useful for your future career path?

Nussbaum-Beach, Sheryl, and Lani Ritter Hall. The Connected Educator Learning and Leading in a Digital Age. Solution Tree Press, 2012.