Mackenzie's ETEC Blog

Finding Online Video Resources In a world where 3.7 MILLION videos are being uploaded you YouTube everyday. You'd think it would be easy to find quality content for any topic! Unfortunately, while it's easy to search this resource, finding quality videos that meet you content and pedagogical goals for the exact student audience level you are teaching is not always easy, and can take hours of watching hundreds of videos to find the right resources.  While paying for videos through some educational services (i.e. Brilliant.org, which produces some amazing videos) is an option for some, not all schools have access or subscriptions to this content. In addition, most paid plans are subscription based, which means you can't assign them to students without getting them individual log-ins, passwords, etc.  Free YouTube videos are easily accessible without passwords and can be embedded into many different learning platforms to streamline use. Many do come with advertising, but most ...

What is a Course Management System? According to the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching : A  course management system  (CMS) is a collection of software tools providing an online environment  for course interactions. A CMS typically includes a variety of online tools and environments, such as: An area for faculty posting of class materials such as course syllabus and handouts An area for student posting of papers and other assignments A gradebook where faculty can record grades and each student can view his or her grades An integrated email tool allowing participants to send announcement email messages to the entire class or to a subset of the entire class A chat tool allowing synchronous communication among class participants A threaded discussion board allowing asynchronous communication among participants So, how is this different from a Learning Management System? I'm still trying to figure that out, and there seems to be a lot of overlap in the definitions. Exploring CMS...

Exploration of Google Apps... with AI? For this design experiment, I explored several Google apps in a new context! I have been using Google apps for year, from Sheets, Docs and Slides to create and collaborate within documents to Maps and Translate when I travel to Sites and Blogger to share online content. While I've played around some with Google Classroom, my school doesn't use it, so I haven't been able to effectively test it with student populations or with a school framework. However, early this week, I got a well-timed invite to help test a new version of some familiar Google tools using Google's own (still under development) in-house AI called Google Workspace Labs .  Figure 1: Screenshot of M. Miller's "trusted tester" invitation for Google Workspace Labs When I got this invitation I was intrigued! Only a limited number of "tester" invitations have been sent out, so this is a sneak peak at some software still in development! From what I...

Throughout this course I have gotten the chance to engage, playtest, evaluate and reflect on a wide variety of Web 2.0 technologies that may be beneficial for my personal growth as an educator, mentor and technology advocate or may beneficial for my students to increase their engagement, deepen their learning, enable collaboration or promote their creativity. As I continue to grow professionally and strive to improve my teaching, I will be continuously evaluating and updating my toolkit of Web 2.0 resources. While evaluating new technology can be time consuming, I believe the experience and guidance I've gained in the course will make it easier for me to screen, test and implement meaningful and enhancing technologies as our Web 2.0 resources continue to expand and new Web 3.0 and beyond resources become available. Below is a snapshot of some of the Web 2.0 tools I evaluated during this course and ways I see myself using them going forward. This snapshot will certainly change as ne...

This post is a follow-up to my original digital footprint search completed several weeks ago at the beginning of my Web 2.0 course. I revisited the searches I undertook originally, and then expanded my searches to include technologies that I experimented with during our Web 2.0 course. Search 1: As with my previous query, a search of my name in quotes "Mackenzie Miller" did not turn up anything about me for the first 12 pages.  Search 2: A search for "Mackenzie B Miller" found my LinkedIn and TikTok (@mackenzie.b.miller) pages, representing a slight increase in the results for this search, which previously only found my TikTok page. Search 3: Next, I started adding some descriptors. Both "Mackenzie Miller" with "engineer" and "Mackenzie Miller" with "teacher" brought up my LinkedIn profile, but not much else. While "Mackenzie Miller" with "circus" found my LinkedIn and also several images of me doing flying...

I've always considered learning to be a lifelong journey. If I'm not learning, exploring, expanding my skillset, pushing my boundaries and trying new things, I'm not living my best life. In this vein, I will certainly be continuing my exploration of Web 2.0 (and 3.0) technology and beyond well past the completion of this course.  Conferences and Conventions: I love the education and networking that happens when energetic, knowledgeable, motivated people get together and idea-swap! When choosing conferences and conventions to attend, I look for ones in areas of interest or potential future interests and prioritize ones with hands-on, workshop-style events -- I feel like a learn the most from these and I get to see the teaching methods modeled more realistically than in a lecture-style conference.  My Network: One of the great things about loving my job is that I talk about it a lot. Weddings, class reunions, kids birthday parties, random people I run into in line a the coffe...