Week 9- VoiceThread

I cannot believe this is already week 9! Only 3 more weeks left in my degree and let me tell you, I absolutely cannot wait! This week we explored the VoiceThread tool and furthered our knowledge of digital rights and responsibilities and netiquette.

One article I found to be particularly interesting is 10 Every Day E-mail Etiquette Resolutions for 2016. This article was a good little refresher of some basic every day e-mail techniques, which includes something as simple as including a 'to' and 'from' line to make the message sound more personal and less like a demand – we must always remember that how others read our messages may not be how we intended. It is best to always put effort into the tone of a message to make sure it is less likely to be misinterpreted! 

This week I also learned about the importance of and Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) in both schools and the workplace. An AUP is a policy that outlines what various technologies owned by either a school or an employer should and should not be used for and lays out the various consequences for not complying with the policy. Although this article on AUPs mostly discusses the policy from a school context, it is a very informative read and lots of the key principles can be transferred into a workplace policy as well.

Now, onto VoiceThread! As I mentioned in my previous post (I have posted a new page on my blog that discusses VoiceThread and shows our class VoiceThread on digital rights and responsibilities) VoiceThread is a very useful and creative collaborative discussion tool. It is sort of an interactive slideshow where multiple users can view, comment and add to the slides. You can leave typed comments, voice comments, video comments and you can also draw on the slides to highlight key information or point to specific things or show a flow of concepts and have this play while the comments are being narrated.

VoiceThread can either be added to the collaborate or the create sections of my PLE. I think I will add it to the create section because it is a creation tool where you can also create with others. This is also one of the sections I was looking to add to over the course of the semester!

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.

This week’s interesting Feedly find…

This week, an article titled 5 Reasons Procrastinators Prosper when Travelling in the Huffington Post caught my eye almost immediately. I’m the type of person who’s a procrastinator when it comes to schoolwork but I plan almost everything else down to the very last detail. My Dad on the other hand, absolutely loves last minute vacations with next to little planning. When I read this article, I immediately thought of how much better some of our trips have been simply because we have no strict itinerary and we really do “go with the flow” (reason #5) which leads to a  more unique experience and a better story to tell when we get home (reason #4). Click on the link above to give the article a quick read – happy travels!

Sedona, AZ
Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.