Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Always Learning!

Robyn Hrivnatz
This past week my class was able to connect with Robyn Hrivnatz through Google Hangouts.  She works at Microsoft in their US Education division.  Her primary job is to work on curriculum development for professional learning for teachers and she also oversees their Microsoft Innovative Educator Teacher Program.  Robyn talked about how in her career she uses social media to keep up with what is going on in the world of education and also with the competition.  It is extremely important to keep up with what your competition is doing throughout any industry, and social media is an easy way to do that.  It is also a good way to find out what your customers want and an easy way to listen to them.

Robyn says that with her job, their customers are educators and students and social media makes it easy to connect with them due to it almost instantaneous results. She also talked about other ways that social media is incorporated into the Microsoft company, such as the twitter handles and other accounts that respond to customers via social media.  Below is the full video of Robyn talking to my class!



MakeyMakey Class Activity
In my class the other day we had fun with these electric circuit boards called Makey Makeys! All the groups used items such as PlayDoh, aluminum foil, and bananas to create electrical currents and control a computer game.  

My group chose to play Frogger! We used a banana to control the left movement, the foil to control the forward and backward movement, and PlayDoh to control the right movements.  We did this with the help of the MakeyMakey control boards which was attached to the objects via color coded wires and to the computer through a USB cord.  It was so amazing, how we could control the game using these random household objects!


Connected Educator - What the Future Holds
In chapter 9 of the Connected Educator, by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, it talks about how the internet is so much more than what people are really utilizing it for.  It isn't just a place to find information, but a way to connect with people from all over the world who we can share our ideas, opinions, and imaginations with.  It is an amazing resource for learning!  People learn so much differently now than they did when technology wasn't so prominent in education and educators need to keep up to date on the newest ways to teach and learn because as technology evolves, so must educators and other people using it within their careers.  

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