Reflection!!

This week is a really overwhelming week for me because I got to clear up the house, pack my stuff, do my homework and fly! I am in New York now and still trying to settle down, get familiar with the public transport services, walk around a little and get use to things! Phew!! It's pretty crazy for me!

For this week, the tools that we are exploring seems to be really useful to create our Personal Learning Network through those tools, especially LinkedIn but specifically for me, instead of looking at my career-related personal learning network, I will be looking at fitness and health network because since the beginning of this course, I am very interested in fitness and health, started to join communities, understand how things function in those communities, created Pinterest board on fitness and health, I thought these are pretty good foundation that I can build upon to create my own personal learning network!

Week 5 is coming to an end and next week is our last week for this course! I would say this course is really intense from the start all the way to the end although the amount of things we have do did slowly goes downhill. But I learned a lot about the many tools out that can be used for different purposes. Well, I wouldn't say that I have become an expert in using these tools but the awareness that we get through this course and the opportunity to try them out, has broaden my horizon on possible Web 2.0 tools that can be used to facilitate learning or performance! It's really amazing! I am really glad that I have taken this course since I generally appreciate online tools and social media stuff, and how wonderful these tools can be to assist us in our personal life or even at work! One more week to go!! Press on!

IFTTT!

If This Then That! This particular tool is pretty straight forward and easy to use! I didn't know such tool even existed! I always wanted to have a website or application that I can manage all my social media accounts and emails all in one place rather than having to open up multiple browsers, do multiple posts on the same thing across different social media platform! This is a one stop website where you can customize how you want to manage the activities you do with your social media accounts. For example, you can connect Instagram and Twitter or vice versa, and when you post an image on Instagram, it will also be posted onto Twitter depending on your personal settings (trigger).

There are many recommended IF recipes on the website itself that you can choose or you can create your own recipe! Pretty cool huh!

I thought this tools make things really efficient in the sense that I do not have to post an image on Instagram and post it again on Facebook, you just have to create the recipe with the tool, put in your preferred settings and it will do the rest for you. Essentially, you just need to do one action on your primary social media account, the tool will help you to post things to your other social media accounts. This is a pretty good tool that can help us segregate the things we post on our social media platforms like for example, I only want my pictures on my Facebook to be posted onto Instagram, I can set this up with this tool and it will do it for me!

This tool also allows you to track things that you do such as work hours, where you have been etc., you can set it up and you will receive email notifications tracking your whereabouts!

Isn't this cool???!!! It is really useful! Personally, I am more interested in using the DO function because of the usefulness of it. While the IF function is useful, the issue for me is that my social media platforms that I use have pretty different audience and they are for different purposes too, so I would rather manage them separately and go through the hassle of posting different things specific for the different social media platform, than to make use of this function. Just my personal preference but otherwise, this is a really good tool if you want to get all your accounts connected in one way or another, or track your personal stuff! Try it out!!

MERLOT!?

Wow! MERLOT is an amazing platform FULL of learning materials of different discipline, you can find materials to conduct courses, assessment tools, assignments and there are also open journal articles! The users put all these materials on MERLOT and share them with everyone within the community, you can develop your own materials, for example if you are interested in genetics, you can create some learning materials related to genetics and submit it, to be shared on MERLOT!

When I first saw the homepage and the amount of different tabs on it, I was thrown off my chair because it looks really confusing but when I took a closer a look, it was actually pretty organized into various categories that you can search for or explore! When the materials are submitted, people within the community can use them and then provide some comments on how useful the materials are, which is a communication mean between the users within the community.

On the left side on the website, you get refine your search based on what ever things you are looking for (there are quite a lot of materials that are available on MERLOT). I decided to just visit DNA from the Beginning, which is like a learning material where you can learn some basic information regarding DNA (it stands for Deoxyribonuclei Acid).

It is really well done and ready to be used!

On the main page, it even tells you who the target audience are and some other information as well!

Once you visit the material, the website will prompt you to rate it! And I guess based on the ratings of the materials, it helps to attract people within the community to look at the material. So it kind of serves as a way to promote the learning materials or tools. However, as we have previous discussed about the use of ratings, where it is very dependent on individual's needs and preference, it may not be a good indicator of whether a learning material is good or not. But I guess in a professional platform like MERLOT, I assumed that people within the community are more critical and professional in providing ratings and comments to these learning materials.

It is a good website where professionals working in the educational institutes or research field, can find inspirations based on the things that have been shared on MERLOT to design their own materials, or even share it! Even for people like me, who wants to learn new things, I could search for them on this website and read about things like DNA! Do try it out and it's free too!

LinkedIn!!

I decided to set up a LinkedIn account and explore it! I thought it is a really professional tool that allows people to post and share their professional background with other LinkedIn users (depending on personal privacy preference, some may set their profile as private).

I think it is a really good platform for headhunters to find and identify professionals, and recruit them to the companies.

We can also post status updates or even upload photos on our profile, quite similar to what we do on Facebook but I think it would be more about formal stuff like getting professional certifications, graduation ceremonies or attending conferences, rather than posting things like, "I had a good breakfast at Starbucks!".

You can also find networks that are related to you (I found the SAF) but most of the profiles are private, which I can understand because of security reasons. When I was updating my profile, I was also thinking about the potential implications of the professional information i.e. overseas exercises and military training, which I put up on the profile. I don't want to reveal too much information because there is always a risk involved as we do not know who is lurking out on the internet. But things like education backgrounds are fine!

With the information that I provided like the universities that I have been to, you can follow the university community, specifically University of Queensland, there are constant shares or updates on news or anything pertaining to UQ. 

You can look up for alumni of the universities that you are from, you can connect with them and read more about their professional lives. The way I see LinkedIn is that it showcase the professional lives of people, whereas Facebook on the other hand shows the social / personal lives of people. Some people wants to keep their personal and professional lives separated, LinkedIn is the way to go and you can manage your professional network with other professional people out there! I think this is a really good tool! I am not too sure if I will be using it for long term because of the nature of my job, I don't really see a point in using this tool to establish a professional network with other military personnel. But I do see a point of using this tool to establish a professional network with Instructional Designers so that we can connect with one another, and share information related to the field!

Reflection!!

Time flies!! And 2 more weeks and we will be done! Fast and furious!

This week is a pretty busy week for me because I am leaving Tallahassee for New York next Friday and I have pack up my stuff, clean up the house and prepare for the move-out inspection on Sunday, which is later in the afternoon! I am trying so hard to manage all these stuff, churning out blog post, read blogs, explore the tools, prepare the Voice Thread (took me 6 hours!!) and at the same time, I was also working on my internship task! So, it was a pretty tiring week for me!

Nevertheless, some of the tools that we have explored this week can be used as part of our produsage assignment. I read a little bit more about produsage on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produsage), instead of presenting the information to the learners, we are getting them to create the information through various means. The students are the users of the information and at the same time, are also the producers of the information! Like what we are doing now on the Wikispace! I think in this context, the students are given the full autonomy to create content that they think or feel are important to them, while they are creating the content as a group or class, every students will also chime in to refine the content through collaboration and discussions to make the content as relevant to everyone as possible because different students will have different expectations of their own learning! This course is so fun!

Creating a Voice Thread for me was pretty crazy! It was a good experience but it took me too long! I had a slide that I wrote a pretty long script to elaborate the stuff, I was on the slide for 30 minutes re-recording my voice over and over again because I kept stumbling over my words haha! 6 hours is no joke hahaha! Moving on to week 5 tomorrow! Hang in there guys!

Pokemon Go Quick Guide!

The latest craze that took the world by storm! Pokemon Go! It is a really fun game! I am not a Pokemon fan (Digimon yes! haha) but I thought it was pretty cool to just try out the game and have some fun! It is pretty fun though but it can take quite a while to get powerful Pokemon, to level up, hatch the eggs, fill up the Pokedex, walk thousands and thousands of miles away from home or around your house to get your desire Pokemon! It is a good cardio exercise isn't it? As I promise on Tweeter to compile a few tips and guides, as well as some of my own strategy, which many Pokemon GOers out there have been doing to eventually become a true Pokemon Master. If you not the competitive type like me, you will do fine just hanging around your backyard to catch the Pokemons, level up and when you happen to travel to other countries for holidays or work trips, you can (if you want to) also check out what Pokemons are lurking around you! The screenshots that I am going to share are my personal Pokemon Go profile and you will be able to see my progress so far too!

Profile

Your own profile tells you what level you are at, the amount of experience you need to get in order to level up, there is a journal that tracks what activities you engaged in, it also shows you which Team you chose to join (I am with Team Mystic), it tells you when did you first started to play this game and how many Gold coins you have. If you click on the Journal, this is what you will see:

It is like a tracking device where it tracks whatever things that you have done like caught a Pokemon, a Pokemon ran away, what items did you receive from the Pokestops when you spin the thingy. It even tells you what time and date you did that! It will also keep a record of when the eggs hatched. It's pretty detailed!

Team

When you reach level 5, you will be asked to join a team! There are 3 teams and you can only select 1, and it will be permanent! So choose wisely! haha! There is Team Instinct, Yellow color, which is represented by the legendary bird Pokemon Zapdos.

Image from: http://pokemon.wikia.com/wiki/Zapdos

Team Mystic (I am in this Team!), Blue color, which is represented by the legendary bird Pokemon Articuno.

Image from: http://pokemon.wikia.com/wiki/Articuno

Team Valor, Red color, which is represented by the legendary bird Pokemon Motress

Image from: http://pokemon.wikia.com/wiki/Moltres

It doesn't matter which team you join, it is just a matter of personal preference!

Hatching Eggs

When you are spinning the thingy at the Pokestops, you will be also have a chance of getting eggs! They come in 2 km, 5 km and 10 km categories, and each categories of eggs will give you different type of Pokemons, and you would have figure out that the longer the distance, the more powerful and rarer the Pokemon will be when they hatch! This is a pretty good website that you can visit to see what kind of Pokemon you will get for each category Link: http://www.touchtapplay.com/pokemon-go-egg-list-a-chart-to-know-what-pokemon-you-will-get/

The eggs need to be put into the incubator in order for them to hatch! Below are some of my screenshots and I show you how to incubate them! When you go to your Eggs, you will see their categories, all you need to do is click on any one of it.

It will show you the Egg and just click on "Start Incubation"

It will show you the incubators that you have in your inventory. Just click on the incubator and use it! That's all you need to do to get your eggs into the incubator!

Everyone of us have a personal incubator that you can use and reuse again after hatch each egg. And then, when you level up to certain levels, you will receive a finite amount of incubator and you can use them, and each time when an hatch from the finite incubator, it will break and it is just one use kind of item. When your eggs are going hatch as you are walking in the park, your phone will just vibrate and you can watch your egg hatch! Don't forget to continue to incubate other eggs after hatching one!

There will be times when your phone hang while the hatching takes place, don't worry about it, the Pokemon will still be in your Pokemon inventory! I personally verified that! So don't worry about it!

Pokemon

These are the stats of the Pokemon, the higher the Combat Power (CP), the more powerful the Pokemon! There is a maximum CP limit if you take a look at the semi circle line drawn across the Pokemon, you will see where it ends. For this Eevee, the CP is pretty high but not at its maximum! This is important because if you have a high CP pokemon and when you evolve it, the new evolved form of the Pokemon will have a very high CP as well! There is a mathematical calculation to that but it is more for geeks like me who wants the best of everything hahaha!

Every time you catch a Pokemon, you will be given a few candies of that specific Pokemon. You can use the candy to power up your pokemon or collect enough of them to evolve it. (Do note that there are Pokemons that do not have any evolution at all). If you have caught too many of the same Pokemon, it is actually good. You can transfer the ones with the lowest CP to Professor Oaks, just scroll down and you will see the "transfer" button! It is just that simple!

Lure Modules

When you level up to certain levels, you will be awarded the lure module that you can use on Pokestops to lure Pokemons to where you are, and you don't have to walk anywhere, the Pokemons will come to you. This is how you set the Lure Module, did you see that white slot on top of the thingy you spin. That is where you put your lure module in!

If you have (which I don't as of now), you will just need to click on the pink color lure module that will appear at the bottom and use it!

This screenshot shows a lure module that is in place :) and everyone within the vicinity will be able to see the lure module at work! Everyone around you benefit from it!

You may have also notice that you have this incense in your inventory that you get from leveling up, it works the same too but you don't need a Pokestop to use it, you can just use it anywhere and Pokemons will come to you, and only you!

Some Quick Leveling Up Strategy

Every new Pokemon you catch will give you tons of experience, every Pokemon you evolve will award you 500 experience, every Pokemon you catch will give you 100 experience point and every Pokestop you spin will give you 50 experience point! when you level up to certain levels, you will get something called the Luck Egg in your inventory. When you use that, the experience point you gain from everything you do as mentioned above will be doubled!! The doubling effect will last for 30 minutes!

For example, I have 10 Pidgeys and I have 120 Pidgey candies, I can basically evolve all 10 Pidgeys and get 500 XP from each of it, in total I will get 5000 XP. And with Lucky Egg, it becomes 10000 XP. It is all about mathematics and some simple calculation and planning here and there! You can keep some of the similar Pokemons, get all the candies, when you think you are ready to evolve all the Pokemons that you have, use the lucky egg and evolve away! You will level up VERY FAST!

Just one thing, you can listen to how the Pokemon sound when you click on the Pokemon at the Pokemon Stat page. Try it out! haha! And Pikachu is the only Pokemon that says Pikachu! The rest are just weird noises! 

This can go on forever but these are just simple information about Pokemon Go :P

Edmodo!

I tried Edmodo and I think it is a really good platform to facilitate learning of a particular subject or even a collection of different subjects!

Edmodo has a pretty similar interface as Facebook, which I think that it may, in some way, appeal to students or teachers in this social media era! You can post things directly onto the main feed but there is no way you can private message anyone on this tool. I think it is good because in this way, it promotes the idea of group interactions, as the students come together and discuss about a particular topic openly, so everyone gets to see each other's point of view and share theirs too, instead of one student sharing with another student privately. So essentially, everything that is related to the topic is being discussed openly on the feeds and everyone gets to see what everyone has got to say! I signed up as a student and joined the EME6414 class! This is what I see on my laptop!

It's like we are trying to conduct a class on Facebook but with features like uploading of assignment files onto your profile if there are any assignments given by the teacher.

You can also monitor your progress, which are your grades on your assignments posted by your teachers!

And it is not restricted to just one course, you can be in multiple courses if all the teachers decided to put the entire semester on Edmodo! It works too! haha I think it is pretty cool but at the same time, I think being the teacher of the class on Edmodo, he or she will have to be actively engaging the students and at the same time, I think it is important to also create some form of a time line to make sure that the students are checking their profile on specific time of the day and week, to participate in any form of online class activities created by the teacher. I feel that for people in Higher Education, we know how to self-regulate ourselves and we are adults, we should know how to manage our time and do what needs to be done for the course like in this class. As for students in elementary schools or high schools, I think the teacher might need to control and manage the students because they may be easily distracted since all these will be done via the computer! Therefore, having some form of a time table for the students to follow would be ideal to keep them on tasks!

The students can even invite their parents onto Edmodo and monitor their kids learning progression! While it may be a good idea to get parents involved in the kids learning so the parents can have a better idea of what their kids have been learning in school. But I think it might be pretty stressful for the students. Taking myself for an example, I would feel really awkward when I am studying and my parents are watching me. Even if it's online, it is their presence that will make me feel awkward, which I think will limit my ability to share how I feel about certain concepts of a particular topic. I will also be worried that my parents will see my assignment scores and if I don't do well, I will be punished etc. It makes the learning environment stressful and it may have a negative impact on a student's learning. What do you think?

Fakebook??!! Are you serious?

When I saw "Fakebook" as one of the few tools for this week, I was like "are you serious?" haha! So I decided to try it out and it was pretty fun but it is for learning purposes, not like Facebook where everything is real (not every profile is real though). Fakebook is just a one page website where we can create imaginary profiles, whatever real life characters or movie characters that you can think of, you can create profile for that character! Being a Harry Potter fan, I created a profile for Professor Dumbledore! haha

It is very easy to work your way through filling up the various personal information (just make it up!) for your favorite character. You can start creating posts for your character and make up all the comments, likes and put images in there. When you type the name into the text box, it will automatically generate the character's profile picture or you can also upload it yourself if you have the pictures! I also added some friends for Professor Dumbledore!

How can we use this for education then? I think this tool can be use in classes for students to learn about literature or history. I am not good in literature or history but I thought with this tool, students can learn more about famous historical figure, for example Albert Einstein, the students can go ahead and find out the personal information of Albert Einstein on the internet and fill up this Fakebook. In addition, read about his famous quotes, his research milestones, other famous people whom he had collaborated with, all these can be inserted into the Fakebook as his post. For example, he could have researched about the theory of relativity and we can have other scientist critiquing on this theory through the Fakebook post and comments. Through this, the students can learn about their accomplishments, the challenges that he faced and eventually becoming a very successful scientist! Furthermore, you can also add in the timeline, when did he discover relativity? All these details could be found on the internet, maybe not all but some of the famous discovery! What do you think??

Google My Maps!!!

I only know Google Map and I didn't know there is Google MY Maps! So I decided to give it a shot and try it out! Initially I went to Google Map and followed the instructions on Blackboard, and I couldn't figure out how to start but it is different! So then I googled and manage to find some instructions, which I realized that it is a different URL (Silly me!).

I thought it is a pretty cool and easy to use application. It resembles a little bit of how photographs that are shared on Flickr, where we can annotate where they were taken, and put descriptions in there!  BUT the thing with My Maps is that there is no way you can upload pictures that you have taken! It has to be directly from the internet! I tried it out and put a pin on where I live, attached a picture URL I found online and a short caption:

It feels like a traveler image blog or something like that, where we can track where we have been to for holidays (I thought it is pretty funny if I were to do an image blog about going to Publix for grocery shopping and etc hahaha!) It's also like a travelling diary where you annotate where you have been to and find pictures online to beautiful it with pictures! Guess what! Being a geeky person, I found a way where you can upload your own pictures onto My Maps! Via Facebook!! So what you can do is this! For example, if you have been NYC and took some pictures of the Empire State Building, right click on the image and copy image address!

Then paste it on to My Maps!

Voilà!! There you go! Personalized Traveler Image Blog! haha! You can even upload videos! I thought it is a pretty cool "add on" to your other social media tools like Facebook. My Maps give us a very good geographical visualization of the entire world, showing us where we have been to for holidays or work trips.

We can toggle the base layer map into various forms too like Satellite map!

Since I am blogging about Google My Maps, I thought I would also share a little bit about Google Map! It is an excellent tool for me who doesn't travel much to be able to explore different part of the world VIRTUALLY without the need for me to be physically present at the location! NYC! If I want to explore NYC a little bit, I can drag and drop that little yellow man icon on the bottom right hand corner of the image, and put it anywhere on the map (I know some of you will try to drop him into the sea! hahaha own up because I did it too! haha, but it will automatically zoom you to the nearest road to the point where you drop the man off.

So I virtually went to Central Park and decided to explore the road a little, it will show you the arrow on the road and you can just virtually "walk" the streets and enjoy the views! How cool is that! Save money on air ticket :P hahaha! No jams and no sweat :P just kidding! haha!

How about exploring Antarctica?

Isn't it cool! How about making exploration a little more exciting!! At the bottom left hand corner, you can toggle between a flat map or a globe style! When you spin the globe, it will show you different places of interest in various regions. You can just click on the image below and it will bring straight to the point where the picture is taken!

I explored a little deeper into where those pictures came from, apparently there is another tool that allows people to share pictures and annotate them onto Google Map!! It's called Panoramio!!

I am pretty sure people who are into photography and travelling will appreciate these tools!! As for me, I love these images, there are really nice pictures taken by professional or amateur photographers! As for learning, I think it would appeal to people who study geography or geology, who are interested in things like fault lines, contours and other geological features on earth. It just goes to show that there are A LOT of places in the world that we have not yet explore and seen! It's time to plan for many trips around the world!

Reflecting!

I feel that this week onward, things are going to get more intense due to the assignments and we are already half way through this course! Time really flies and especially when we are trying out so many web 2.0 tools every week and interacting with one another through them! It's really an eye-opening experience for me because I really didn't expect that we have THAT many tools out there for people to use and interact with one another. I only know the more popular ones like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the Big Three I call them!

I was constantly thinking about how can we incorporate some of the interactive features of the various tools into a digital system, to facilitate learning in a military setting. For sure, this has to be a closed system where only military personnel are allowed to access the features and share information within the closed community. I feel that there are a lot of challenges that we might face such as budget issues, security concerns (e.g. hackers) and the need to redesign the curriculum to incorporate these tools. By virtue of such tools, we are giving a lot of control to the soldiers to learn what needs to be learn but at the same time, there must be someone to watch over them to make sure they are meeting all the training requirements, someone who is trained maybe in Instructional Design to facilitate all the interactions that are going on within the community (why does it sound like I am referring to myself? haha) One of the main problem would be the limited amount of time we have to train our soldiers (2 years). There are indeed a lot of potentials in these tools to facilitate learning in various industries as we have all tried them out in this course (and more to come!). It is a very interesting learning journey for me and it really gets me thinking a lot about the potentials of ALL these tools!

Flickr is like Instagram on Steroids!

Some of us took up the Flickr challenge posted by Dr Dennen, I decided to explore Flickr a little bit more and found that it kind of resembles Instagram but on STEROIDS! Based on my previous blog post on how Instagram works, the pros and cons of it (http://ernestlearning6414.blogspot.com/2016/07/instagram.html), I found that Flickr has a few features that are similar to Instagram and both are tools that allow users to upload pictures. As I have mentioned in my previous post, Instagram only works with a smartphone but Flickr works on both medium i.e. smartphone and computer. 

The thing about Flickr is that you can organize your pictures into various albums or categories, you can join different groups of people who are interested in things like nature photography or anything that are of interest to you.

For Instagram, you can only follow people but there are no groups that you can join other than viewing images based on the hashtags! I guess this groups joining feature that Flickr offers is really good! It just provides us with a more organized way of viewing the pictures that are of interest to us. You can comment and like the images, there are also discussion groups / forums within each interest group!! This is really awesome! Apart from viewing the pictures, liking it and post a few comments, you can create threads and talk about the images or techniques in taking those pictures etc! It's pretty cool!

If you are avid photographer and traveler, you can even provide detailed specifications on how you took those pictures and where did you take them!! And shared it with everyone on Flickr! I thought this is a good way to keep a photography or travel journals pretty much like visual/image blogging!

I like how Flickr allows us to organize our pictures, which Instagram doesn't offer such feature! This is an awesome tool!

Storify!

I saw Sophia's Storify creation (it's on the Periscoping session we had and the Story was really well done!) and so I decided to give it try, and centered my story around Pokemon Go!

I thought it was a pretty cool application that allows us to pull out information from various social media tools like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and many other applications, that you would like to include in your story! It is a pretty straight forward application and you just have to search for the content that you want to include to your story, type some words in them to describe the images or videos that you have picked up from the various social media tools!

What I did was to search for Pokemon Go from Facebook and I just drag and drop the piece of information that I would like to include in the story! You can toggle it into various layouts i.e. story, grid or slideshow! If you have time, you can go to this link https://storify.com/ernestkoh87/getting-started and see what I have created! It is a pretty short story! :P

I think it is a good platform that you can use to curate various sources of information from the internet with various perspectives on a particular news, which will provide a good overview on what is actually going on around the globe! Just give it a go and I think it is pretty fun!

YouTube has more to offer!!!!!

As we all know, as an Instructional Designer, we need to find ways to gain learner's attention (Gagne's nine events of instructions) and if you have some time to spare, take a look at the YouTube video below that briefly tells you what Gagne's nine events of instructions are all about!

One of the ways is to show a video clip at the beginning of a presentation or class to gain the students' or learners' attention. In the last semester, one of our assignment requires us to do a presentation to our class and I thought it would be a good opportunity to apply what I have learned in the course to my presentation, specifically the nine events of instructions. So, I found a lot of YouTube videos that were relevant to the context of my presentation and that was how I started to explore YouTube, and make use of some of features that YouTube offers! For this course, I played around with YouTube a little more and it is a pretty awesome platform for us to create a playlist of videos that are of interest to us, pretty much like a bookmarking kind of a feature. You can also create a playlist of your favorite songs too! 

The videos are uploaded by the members in the YouTube community, and you can subscribe to the channel or member who uploaded these videos on YouTube, for example TheEllenShow uploads all the Ellen Shows onto YouTube, when you subscribe to the channel, you get notifications when there are new video clips being uploaded onto that channel. If you don't wish to be notified, you can un-check the notification function! 

I subscribed to a few channels on YouTube and it will appear on the subscription list on the left, you can just click on any of the subscribed channel (it's free by the way) and it will show you all the videos that have been uploaded by that person or company. Below is a print screen of what you would see.

It is like you are following a person on Twitter or Facebook, but instead of seeing pictures or tweets, you would see videos being uploaded on the person's or company's profile. There is even a discussion tab on the profile for us to post a general comment or anything related to the videos that are being shared. You can also comment on the video page itself, you can like or dislike it, you can save the video or you can share it too!

There are multiple social media tools that you can share your favorite video in like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Blogger. If you don't have any social media tools, you can email the video to someone and share it with person via email!

It is a pretty useful tool if you are someone who likes to use video clips as a way to make your presentation more interesting, you could make use of the various features that YouTube offers to save up the interesting videos that are available on YouTube and embed them into your presentation slides. If you have an interest in videography and would like to share it with the world to gain some followers or subscribers, YouTube is a pretty good platform to do so! You can create a profile and start uploading videos to your profile! I am using YouTube to save interesting videos that I have came across on Facebook or anywhere on the internet. And when you have "liked" certain videos, it will also appear on your dashboard as "liked videos". If you have watched or search for videos, it will be saved under history! You can clear it out if you want to!! YouTube is a pretty awesome tool, which I believe many of us would have already tried it out!!

Reflection!

Week 1 was a pretty overwhelming and confusing week for me! However, everything seems to have fallen into place in week 2 and the things that we are doing or will be doing have become clearer as the day goes by!

We had a lot of fun activities this week, Instagram challenge, blog challenge, Periscoping and Snapchat video recording of our pets! I love it! It's really fun and at the same time, we are also learning about the features of each of the applications that we are exploring as a class. Some of us are frequent users of the applications and some of us are new users, and with us sharing our experience with one another, at the same time learning by doing (exploring and playing with the tools), it helps us speed up our learning process!

The thing about this course is, although we were told that we should spend at least 7.5 hours per week to work on our stuff, I feel that I am always working on something related to the course everyday like monitoring the communities, getting things ready for knowledge sharing, exploring a lot of applications, interacting with everyone and so on! I felt really engaged and perhaps it is really how this course is being structured, and the same time we are exploring many applications that can potentially aid us in our work or personal life in the future if we found them to be useful to us! Like PINTEREST! I love it, 100%! It is SOOOOO useful! You got to try it out!!

Before this course, the only social media tool or web 2.0 based tools that I am familiar with are just Instagram and Facebook. It is fascinating to know that there are so many tools out there that have very creative features, which can be used to facilitate knowledge sharing, communications, real-time interactions and many more!

Pinterest!!!!!!

Initially, I was planning to compile a series of PowerPoint slides with fitness-related information that are useful to anyone, who are interested in keeping fit and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. After which, I would upload the slides onto Slideshare as part of the assignment. After listening to the voice thread on knowledge sharing, Dr Dennen mentioned about sharing existing information on Pinterest. I was really curious what Pinterest is and decided to explore it!

To be honest, I fell in love with Pinterest!!! It is so good and I love it!!! You will have to create Business Account (don't worry, it is free!!) in order to fully utilize the functions and also, there are analytics function for us to track how many views are there, how many people are following you, what is the impact of the things that you have curated. It is very easy to use! It allows us to save whatever information that we find online, be it fitness, science, astronomy, psychology, movies, YouTube videos, you name it, these information are "pinned" onto the board.

You can create multiple boards and categorize them into specific genre! Like for mine, I create a board on fitness and health, so whatever fitness information that I chanced upon or deliberately searched for on the internet, I will be able to pin it up on the board. IT IS REALLY GOOD! In the past, I used to bookmark the websites that I found interesting information about and it is really a hassle going through all the clicks and stuff, to retrieve these bookmarks, or sometimes we try to search the information via our browsing history. With all these stuff, sometimes we clear the cache data or history from our browsers, we lose these interesting information. So with Pinterest, it is like bookmarking the websites that you have visited and instead of looking at a list of long website description or URL, you will see this on Pinterest instead.

It provides us with visual information and when you click on any one of it, it gives you a larger view of the image and there is a tab, which you can click to visit the website where the information came from!

I pinned a YouTube video onto the board and I can view the video directly from my board, without the need to open up a new browser, type in YouTube and so on. It is really efficient!!!!! On top of all these, there are features for us to communicate with others through messages, you can comment on the information, you can view who else had same information pinned to their personal board. During the set up, it will ask you for the genre that you wish to follow or create, it will then provide you with a lot of information that have been pinned on the boards of various users, which could be of interest to you based on what you have selected! There is a search function that you can basically search for anything you want! Trust me! IT IS REALLY GOOD! Sorry, I am really excited to know about Pinterest and it is helping me a lot in terms of my interest and also, in the past few days, a few of my Facebook friends have started to create accounts and use the features! It also gives us an option to install Pinterest as an add on to our browser (top right hand corner of the picture, you will see the Pinterest logo, that is the add on), which allows to us pin ANYTHING that you can find on the internet! Below is an image of how that add on works! Basically, I went to a random YouTube video and I click on the add on button, any available videos (be it the main video or those recommended videos at the side) will appear and you can choose which one you wish to pin to your board!!!! This is so awesome isn't it??????

You got to try this out! This is really good and I am super excited about it! haha!

Happily Snapping Snapchat!!

I downloaded Snapchat just a few weeks ago because I was really curious about the funny videos and face swap features that it has, so I decided to give it a go and have fun with it! That isn't just the only function that it has, it also allows us to add friends and chat with them via text, phone call, video call and short video records of what you wish to say to the person you want to chat with. I think these features are pretty cool and fun for us to interact with our friends! As far as I know, on Instagram, there are people who include their Snapchat ID on their Instagram profile description where anyone could just add them, and start to connect or chat with them. It is one of the way to gain followers especially for celebrities or fitness models!

There is a feature that allows us to read news. When you click on one of the stories on the application, it will show you either a short video or infographics with music, sounds or someone talking, if you are interested, you can swipe upwards and there will be the news in text for you to read. The stories are pretty random stuff like sports, celebrities, certain brand products and national geographic information.

There are not a lot of features in it and I googled it to find out more about what else can Snapchat do for us (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapchat#Funding_and_valuation), it is definitely not something that I would use for long term though. I think the only thing that appeals to me more is the chatting features! The creating of "stories" and "geofilters" seems really complicated to me. I personally would prefer news feed or dashboards like what Netvibes provides, which I can customize to my own needs.

I went to the website and try to play around with whatever tabs there are, you can create your own geofilters or stories. When I see this I am pretty lost hahaha! I guess it is not really an application that I would use at all.

Maybe I would use the chat functions but it is a novelty, and once you start using it for awhile, it is not going to be as appealing as it is initially. There was a period where a lot of people posted funny videos (vomiting rainbow haha!) or images of them swapping faces with their dogs, cats or friends, but not anymore now (maybe not as much as how it used to be). Are there anyone who uses Snapchat very often? You could probably share with me some of your interesting "stories" that you have created, I will be more than happy to take a look at it haha!