Mackenzie's ETEC Blog

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...