Blog Post 8

  I really enjoyed creating a teacher website using Weebly. I thought it allowed for so many different design and personalization options that made it truly a website that I made myself. Compared to the other ways we have created a webpage, I thought Weebly was very user friendly and allowed creativity to flow. I can’t remember a single complaint I had about it, since every problem that I did have with creating the webpage had a video explaining how to use different features. The one downfall of having a wide variety of options is that it can feel a little overwhelming as a beginner web page creator. However, once I was comfortable with Weebly, I had no difficulty with it at all. This assignment has made me want to create a webpage for my classroom in the future because of how useful of a source it is for students. If interested, this is the link to my webpage.

    Now that I am used to Diigo’s platform, I find that I truly enjoy scrolling through different people’s posts and comments. I learned how to highlight and bookmark different articles that I find interesting to share with the class and how to view other people’s websites. Diigo can be immensely useful to teachers in order to share different resources, lesson plans, news articles, and other web resources that could be helpful to others. For classroom application, it could be used for research-based activities, especially for English papers that require a lot of outside resources. I could also find Diigo pages for my PLN.

Teachers are responsible for being the driving force in educational change, especially the upcoming teaching generation of millennials and incoming Gen Z. Not only do we gain professional development from implementing these new technologies in our classroom, older teachers also develop these skills since younger teachers can help them through it. There is a responsibility of teachers to introduce these new technologies in the classroom so that students can become proficient in growing technologies. Education Weekly is an independent news site dedicated to updating teachers on current education events. On their site, they have a Digital Directions page that talks about recent updates in educational technology.