Kyle Roark's EME 6414 blog

 I thought that for my third blogpost for the week I would take a look at one of our readings for the week. While I am very much a beginner to the process I am looking forward to exploring data analytics more in coming courses within the ISLT program. Thus, my interest was peaked by several of the readings for this week in class, especially the one from Watson, Wilson, Drew and Thompson on Small Data in the educational analytics process. The authors argue that the use of "big data" in the learning process has ultimately been a failure. For the authors the distinction between big and small data comes in the number of students analyzed and the attention to detail given to each student. The big data process focuses on large numbers of students looking for overall patterns in engagement. This study however, focuses only on one student and uses the data on that students interaction with an online learning environment to come to conclusions on its effectiveness. Especially interest...

 For my second blog post for the week with EME 6414 I thought I would take a look at Sutori. This is a tool used to design classroom presentations that allow for a little more interaction with the content than traditional resources such as PowerPoint or Prezi. As I have played around with it a little bit the real benefit seems to come in the ability of the creator to allow integration with Google, or Microsoft Teams. But in addition it is very easy to embed web content. Instructors can tag the content and recommend it to particular members of the class. In addition, to more traditional methods of assessment such as Quizzes. As an example of the types of content you can embed into Sutori and the overall look, here is a screenshot: Notice that the overall look is sort of like a timeline going down that guides you through the materials. Along with text and the other tagging features I mentioned above you can also fairly easily embed other visual or video content.  When looking at...

Over the past several weeks I have gotten into the habit of blogging about the different tools that we have been using for EME 6414. In the past I have mostly enjoyed learning about some new and relevant tools that I had not really heard of or used in any real depth in an educational setting. However, this week I was surprised to see Google Earth as a web2.0 tool recommended to us to try out for educational purposes with some guidance being provided by Google on how to do so.   First, Google points out in its instructional content that users have the ability to add their own images to the satellite, or street view, images provided by the site itself, but more importantly from an educational perspective users can share their own images and comments regarding particular locations on the map. This makes Google Earth more like the other tools we have explored in the class around tagging and sharing internet-based content, such as Hypothes from a few weeks back.  Second, G...

 As the week is coming to an end for EME 6414 I thought I would go through one final reading for the week as I compose my final blog post. I took a look at an article from Hu, Torphy, Opperman, Jansen, and Lo regarding knowledge communities on Pinterest. They focus on the informal learning that takes place through Pinterest, an online platform where individuals can post images of projects that they have been working on to spark discussions regarding best practices in the classroom or other topics that may come up.  Not surprisingly, the authors found that Pinterest was the most popular form of social media use to share technology ideas for the classroom. Through the process of sharing ideas, the authors point out that social capital is developed among educators on Pinterest through this unique Social Knowledge Community. This is simply to say that when teachers are looking for new ideas they turn to those that they see as peers and mentors through this social space. Yet, what ...

 For the second tool that we explored this week for EME 6414 we took a look at Slack. I actually have used Slack before for group projects and found it to be very helpful in organizing conversations. However, I am sure that I only scratched the surface of all of the different tools that are available in Slack.  An initial thought that came to mind as I was looking over the product webpage was that the product is very similar to Microsoft Teams and some of the features that have been recently updated there. Thus, I think when I'm looking at what platforms I personally might use in the futute it seems like Slack might not be the best option because I can essentially do most of the same things with a platform that is provided to me for free by being at FSU.  One feature however that I did notice on slack that is not available on Teams, at least not that I am aware of, is the ability to click on someone's profile and see their location in the overall org chart of their team. ...

 I really enjoyed learning about several of the tools in last weeks readings/tools for EME6414, especially Hypothes. Similarly, this week I was introduced to Trello for the first time. I found this platform to be overall fairly appealing to the eye and very intuitive to use. As I looked at it the platform seems like it could be used in a variety of settings, such as the workspace, as it is primarily designed to create collaborative lists of content. For EME6414 in an instructional setting our class focused on the lists corresponding to certain questions to answer. Responses to lists are referred to as cards in Trello and each card came to be class answers to the questions asked at the top of the list. However, I could definitely imagine uses far beyond this question/answer format.  As I'm thinking of how I might use this in a collaborative educational setting beyond the Q/A format it seems that it would be particularly well suited for group projects where there are a list of t...