PC Maintenance and Security

There were many tutorials to choose from within the PC Maintenance and Security workshop. The three that I choose to learn from were Making Email Safer, Organizing Computers, and Tips for Safer Web Browsing. I thought that learning more about these three things would help me with my daily use of computers.

By watching each of the tutorials I learned tips to keep my computer more safe. Here are the tips that I learned:

Making Email Safer- I learned how to set up filters for Gmail. This will help to control the emails that I receive to my account. This will also help make sure that some emails do not accidently get put into my spam folder.

Organizing Computer- I learned about this program called Roboform. This program is a password manager. It becomes very difficult when you have to create a different password for all of the different sites you join. This program can help generate a password, it can manager passwords, and it can also assist in filling out forms that ask for your basic information. This is a very neat tool that I think will be very helpful to use.

Tips for Web Browsing- When learning about different tips for web browsing the one thing that stuck out to me that I didn’t know before was a program called Sandboxie. One of the main uses of Sandboxie is that when you go on a webpage that has spyware the spyware is trapped in sandbox and does not go back to your computer. This makes it so that viruses are not spread to your computer they are trapped on this sandbox on the program Sandboxie.
I hope that these tips help others as much as they have helped me to learn about Internet and computer security.

Social Networking

I have become very familiar with social networks during my time in college. I was introduced to Facebook when I began college and have used it ever since to keep in contact with friends and family. I have also found Facebook to be a great tool when looking for a job. Many teachers would post openings that they have heard about or openings that they had at their school. This helped me to be aware of what was available. I have also used Facebook to keep in touch with others teachers who I went to MSU with. I am able to communicate with them about ideas, questions, and problems that I am having in my classroom and they are able to do the same.

Another part of social networking that I have found to be very useful as a teacher is joining groups about education and teaching. In these groups many ideas are shared that I can adapt to use in my classroom. This is also a place where you can ask other teachers questions and get advice from teachers.

I think that young students can also benefit from social networking. This week I was just introduced to Edmodo. Edmodo is a place where student and teachers can interact. Edmodo does not share any personal information. This would be helpful for students to be able to use at home when they have a question or are unsure of something that they need to accomplish for class. I am excited to learn more about Edmodo and see how I can integrate and introduce it to my students and parents.

I really enjoy using social networks to keep in touch with friends and family. I also enjoy using them to benefit my career.

Getting Things Done Reflection

I consider myself to be a very organized person. I always have a to-do list of what I need to accomplish at work and also for my course work. I find that if I do not have a list of what I must accomplish it is much more difficult to prioritize and to keep myself focused on what needs to be done. I was very excited to try the GTD process to see if it would be helpful to me.

When I first thought about trying GTD I had to think of what I would use to organize the process. I thought of the different options that I had to choose from. I could use my phone, paper and pencil, or my computer. I have found before that I am not very good about updating list and things that I need to do in my phone. In the past I have found that paper and pencil is the most effective way for me to organize what I need to accomplish. I decided that I would use paper and pencil to organize this process.

This process helped me to put what I needed to accomplish into prospective. One of the major differences in the process and what I have used before is the collect portion. Being able to just list everything that needs to get done in one place without prioritizing. I have noticed that before I tried GTD I would try to prioritize right when I starting writing my to-do list, this became overwhelming.

Overall, I found that GTD really helped to focus me on what I needed to accomplish and when it needed to be accomplished by. Along with the collect step, I also found the review step helped me to see what I had accomplished and what still needed to get done. The five steps were easy to follow and have become part of my routine when planning out my week. I plan on using this process in the future to help me to stay organized with my very busy schedule.

Blog VS. Website

Blog and websites are both tools that are used to publish information onto the internet. The main difference between a blog and a website is that a website remains the same for a extended period of time, whereas a blog is constantly changing. A blog is frequently updated by the blogger with new post or ideas. On a blog the post are organized by when they are posted and visitors can easily tell when there is a new post. Also on blogs, visitors can comment on what the blogger is discussing. The blogger and other visitors can then interact with you about your comment or question. On websites, there are sometimes discussion threads or forums but you are not able to comment on a post like you can on a blog. Websites and Blogs are both useful in different ways.