Thursday, December 10, 2015

Journal #7: Professional Learning Network


Over the past few weeks of the course, I have really utilized by twitter and RSS feeds.  I found that twitter, for me, was the best and easiest way (and by easy i mean most efficient) way to get involved and follow along with some PLNs.  Some of the ones I followed or checked most often are called ALiEM, which shares a group of ideas on podcasts, blogs, and other educational material, and FOAM_highlights, which stands for Free Open Access Medicine.  These two were great in the sense that you can comment on peoples posts, and on the videos, links, pictures, podcasts and blogs that were shared among those following along in the group.  Not only did my involvement allow me to find important topics to discuss and share, but people began to follow me as well, and listen and watch the things that I felt were important to share, and so it really became a wonderful interactive experience.  

I think PLNs are a great way to really concentrate a lot of information for a specific topic, and provide a great avenue for interaction and sharing among those involved in the group.   As far as for my blog, I decided to begin a simulation blog, as this is something that i love and do best, and it has also attracted a lot of readers.  I wish that i could blog more often, but time permitting, in the future, hope that this will be something that I continue to pursue and provide ideas about simulation education to my colleagues in the future! 

Journal #6: Self Reflection

During the first 5 weeks of the our introductory HTML course, I learned many things about creating a basic website, how to set up the basic organization of a website, and how to use css to style and formate the webpages in a way that is useful and visually appealing to the user.   Although I think that the hardest part of this portion of the course was to come with the idea and design of my final website would be, I found that the linking exercise below was one of the most challenging book assignments because it required so much time to put the pictures into thumbnails and ensure that all of the links worked and reverted back to the home page screen.  The link to the assignment is provided below!