Technology has been utilized in many schools as years pass by. I remember in middle/high school, our class got a smartboard. We could write on the board digitally and do many other things. It was pretty new so a lot of the teachers were not able to utilize it fully. I believe that new technologies will be set in many schools and that as instructors/teachers we need to be responsible for fully using the technology given to us. I believe by constantly exploring different blogs and websites regarding new technology will help me keep up with the fast evolution of technology. I already do have many social media like Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and many more. Rubin (2020) states, “Tools are commonplace, but knowledge is not”. There will always be tools available for us to use; however, if there’s no knowledge of the tool, it clearly has no use as a tool. I believe that we should strive to seek knowledge of many technological tools that are given to us so that we can utilize the full potential of it and also teach it to students as well!

I enjoyed trying out the coding exercise and learning how coding can connect to many different fields that I never thought! There is a platform called Blackbird that teaches coding in an easy way for students. Byrne (2022) states, “Through Blackbird students learn to write code instead of positioning blocks to create a program as they would do in something like Scratch”. There are different curriculums you could choose from and like the coding exercise I did, it has brief instructions on the left side and the code editor on the right side of the screen. I thought that this would be a great program even for me to learn about the basic needs of coding. I have this thought in the back of my head saying “When will I ever use coding?”. But I think it’s not bad to be prepared!

Another blog that I came across that caught my interest was the blog from The Daring Librarian. The name of the blog itself stood out so I looked through her different blog posts and saw a post that I was intrigued which was about Bitmojis. For the Digital Learning Assignment, I created a Bitmoji classroom so I wanted to learn more about the different things that they had. The author states that there is a new feature (or a missed one) that Bitmoji has that not a lot of people know about. (Jones, 2021). When you type in the word, you are able to make a Bitmoji with that word! So you could type in your name and your Bitmoji character it pops up with your name on it. The tools are given, but sometimes it is up to the user if they would like to explore it more and find new features that were necessarily not mentioned by the tool creator!

References

Byrne, R. (2022, August 1). Blackbird Provides an Innovative Way for Anyone to Teach Coding. Free Technology for Teachers. https://www.freetech4teachers.com/

Jones, G. (2021, August 29). Do You Know About Secret Bigmoji’s?. The Daring Librarian.https://www.thedaringlibrarian.com/2021/08/secret-bitmoji.html

Rubin, R. E. & Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science (5th ed.). ALA Neal-Schuman.