Weekly Reflection #9

In this session we explored a couple of tools that are a great way of sharing and collaborating with fellow digital citizens. The first tool that we took a short look at this week was PollDaddy, which is an online survey application that can be used to ask questions to the viewer who can then respond. PollDaddy also tracks the responses and can show statistics about the responses. I have used another similar application in a recent school project called SurveyMonkey and I found it to be a really easy to use tool that provided quick results on any subject you can think of. The second tool that we investigated this week was VoiceThread, which is a tool that allows people to easily collaborate using voice recordings to comment on different threads. Check out my short summary of this web tool here.

Darlington, S. (CC), 2013. Retreived from: http://synergiseducation.com/blog/voicethread-interactive-presentations-made-easy/

Both of these web tools can contribute to building knowledge either by creating your own poll on PollDaddy to find out the opinion of the viewer or by researching a topic on VoiceThread. Both applications allow the user to interact with others as there is a comment section on PollDaddy, but obviously the voice interaction on VoiceThread is a great tool for communicating with others as it gives a more face-to-face feel than simply sending paragraphs of text back and forth.

As I discussed in my short post in the link above, VoiceThread would go on my PLE under the "connect" and "convenience" sections, so I won't bore you with repeating myself, but once again I would encourage you to check out the link in the first paragraph to learn more about this great tool. PollDaddy would fit into my PLE under the "connect" "create" and "convenience" sections as this application allows anyone to create a poll which they can share easily with people to get their opinion. Web tools that fall into all three categories on my PLE are rare and for that reason, this can be an incredibly useful tool.

These tools are both unique from other tools I have tried in the past in modes of communication between the people. PollDaddy is a much more convenient way of asking questions and gathering results as opposed to posting a question on a blog and recording answers manually. VoiceThread is unique based on the fact that people can communicate using text, but also using voice recordings, which gives an entirely different dimension to online communications.

Once again this week we looked at the digital rights & responsibilities of being a digital citizen by discussing scenarios of technology use. You can check out my response here. If you want more background on digital rights & responsibilities, check out my blog reflection from session 8.

Here are some tips for using VoiceThread:

10 Tips for Using VoiceThread

On my Feedly this week I saw a couple of different scenarios posted by fellow classmates that I think are interesting situations. Take a look and respond to any of our posts, the more the merrier! Here are the posts by my friends Chris and Shannon.