Social Bookmarking & Excel vs. Google Docs

Social bookmarking is a way to save your bookmarks online and share them with others. All your bookmarks and tags are made public for easy sharing. Of course, you can make them private but there is really no point to that. Making your bookmarks public, allows others to use and benefit from your tags and makes sharing very simple. Sharing the bookmarks contributes to the social networking purose of a site like diigo or delicious.
I created a diigo page last semester and I use it for my job all the time. I bookmark my favorite websites and can find them no matter if I am at home, work or school because I can access my diigo page anywhere, anytime on whatever computer I am currently on. It helps me as a student becasue I have bookmarked all the websites for standards and lesson plans and I can access them anytime I need them. I have several different websites bookmarked for worksheets and lesson plan ideas that help when I am developing lesson plans for a class.
As a teacher, social bookmarking can help me because my collegues and I can share the latest websites we have found and it makes doubles or even triples our resources without me personally spending hours and hours trying to find relevant websites. The tags make it easy because I will be able to see all of my coworkers tags and be able to search for the websites on the subject or content area I need at the current time.

If my school district was switching to google docs, I would have to argue against it. I am just recently getting better on Excel and I think google docs makes using a spreadsheet so much more confusing. It is hard to navigate around google docs spread sheet. I do like that it can be shared easily with others but I think taking the extra step with using Excel and emailing it to others in an attachment is worth the little extra work. I am not a fan of google docs. For example. when I had to do a project in google docs last semester, I choose to do the pet pictograph and I could not figure out how to put a picture in my bar graph to create a pictograph. Excel was so easy to figure out how to insert a picture into the bar graph and make a pictograph. I wasted a lot of time on google docs trying to figure out how to do something as simple as insert a picture. Google docs is not as easy to work on as Excel and I do not think any school district should switch from Excel to google docs.

Using Excel in the Classroom

I have never been a big fan of Excel and that was probably because I was never trained on how to use it. I was never taught all the things that Excel can do and make easier. With my new job, I can constantly using Excel to manage my department budget, create attendence sheets, run report numbers, etc. As I am using it more and more, I am begining to appreciate all the neat things it can do and it definitely makes things easier. But it took me awhile to get used to using Excel and my boss had to show we a lot about it and what it can do for me. I have had mini training lessons in certain parts of Excel. Now that I use it, I am getting more comfortable with it.
There are many ways that Excel can be used in the classroom. For example, it can be used to log the weather. Every morning, the students can record the weather and temperature and look for patterns throughout the year (NETS-S 1 D). It can also be used for daily attendence and lunch counts (NETS-S 3 D). The students can take turns being in charge of using Excel to add up the lunch count numbers for each student. Teachers can use Excel for grading and averaging. Teachers can also use Excel to create graphic organizers such as a KWL chart or Venn diagram, as well as rubrics (NETS-S 3 B). Excel can be extremely helpful with mathematics lesson when teaching probability, you can use the dice and do the probability act with Excel. It can be a visual aid in learning fractions and proportions. It can be very useful in teaching money management and balancing a checkbook (NETS-S 4 C). It can be used with question of the day and the class has to answer a question, such as "what is your favorite pet?" and there is a place to put a tally mark on the board and then the morning learner will end the number of tally marks into Excel and see what the class's most popular favorite pet is. It can serve as a great getting to know the class activity (NETS-S 6 D).
Excel can be used in each and every classroom in all subjects. Teachers just need to be willing to learn how to navigate Excel and cannot be afraid to use it. I know before I had a job where I needed to use it, I had no interest in using Excel, I thought that word could do everything for me. I am now realizing that if I would have used Excel earlier, it could have saved me a lot of time and energy on certain projects.

New Language evolves from Technology Advances

Technology has definitely evolved our language over the past few years. Students are speaking an entirely different language than what is familiar to some teachers and their parents. For example, you may hear students say "friended" which is not a word in the dictionary but due to the new social networking website known as Facebook, "friended" has become a word used daily by its users. I truely believe that it won't be long until "friended" and "defriended" are added to the dictionary. When I tell my sister, I friended someone on Facebook, she knows exactly what I am talking about; my mother on the other hand looks at us like we are speaking an entirely different language and she does not know what we are saying. To her, we are speaking a different language. It is the new tech language.
The ways in which we communicate are very different. My mom will call her friends or family up and talk on the phone for hours because they might not have talked in a week. My friends and I are in constant contact and technology has made that very easy. It is rare that I will spend hours on the phone with my friends. However, I will constantly text them throughout the day or email them to say hi or send them a comment on Facebook. I believe technology has made it very easy to stay in touch with people. Especially with today's society where everyone is constantly on the go, the one thing everyone always has with them is their cell phone and it is very easy to contact anyone, anywhere, anytime with cell phones. We can be in constant connection and communication with our families and friends. I think that is a major advantage of the technology advances we have made in the last few years.

Digital Natives vs. Net Gen/21st Cent Learner

Digitial natives, aslo referred to as Digital Immigrants, are defined as "Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them."
For Net Gen/21st Century learners, we were born into a world of technology and gadgets and we are familiar with the latest versions of games, software, etc. We can pick up on it because we have been using technology since we were born. It is an important part of our everyday life. We rely on it and depend on it. In contrast, digital natives do not rely on technology as much. They are more old fashion.
Digital natives and net gen/21st century learners, learn very differently. As stated in the reading, one of education's biggest problems today is that teachers are stuck in their old fashioned way of teaching because most of them are digital natives. However, the students that they are teaching are net gen/21st cent learners and learn in a completely different manner than they are being taught in. Teachers and students are not clicking and do not have an understanding of one another because advances in technology has formed a gap between them. Unfortunately, some teachers are not willing to adapt their teaching and keep up with the latest ways to motivate and engage their students, but causes a problem.
It is important for teachers to remember that the net gen/21st cent learners are used to having everything at their fingertips with the internet, electronics and technology so they thrive from instant gratification and frequent rewards. Technology has made it so easy to retrieve information and answers almost immediately when they are needed and that is what students today are used to, even us college students.