Digital persona is a delicate balancing act of keeping yourself close to your real life and yet different, less clear. A digital persona is a chance to give a new perspective on yourself, yet this new version of yourself must keep the respectful mindset of a digital citizenship. Digital citizenship is so much like real citizenship except, that people also have to be aware of how their personal information is shared with the digital world at large. A digital persona is like decoding in reverse, the individual must build how they want others to decode them. They have this power when crafting their digital persona, by using certain words and certain images it creates a mental path that most casual digital decoders will follow. Digital citizenship on the other hand is like meaning making, each person has their own personal understanding of what makes a good citizen, what they have to build up to have others welcome them as a good citizen. I fulfilled each requirement of this course, so I have tried many different kinds of creative makes, the most obvious being the blogging site itself, but I also tried, Kahoot, Mindomo, and Flipgrid. The more I was made aware of not only how my words impact others, but the impacts others words can have on me and my actions mattered when online. Without looking at the small details of online articles and posts I will miss out on important details that would help me understand the underlying intentions of the writer(s). I used basic news sources like CBC, CTV, Global and the Toronto Star and Sun to keep me informed on the comings and goings of the world. I like to check multiple sources to see what they say and build my own opinions off them. I like to also model my digital persona to what I expect a future employer will look for, I’m active enough to seem social, but reserved enough to not look like a bad influence on my future students. I also had many seminars in high school on digital competency, how to edit a profile to show what you want seen, and I took those lessons to heart. I have wanted to be a teacher for years ad because of that I understood that in this new age of technology digital competency is vital component to success. The line of digital competency is also ever changing, it moves as the invention of new technology allows. Critical digital literacy and the lessons learned in this class will allow me to teach students what I learned here, the lessons that will help in making different media creations. The different programs I encountered in this class gave me a good starting point to create the same sort of introduction of different medias to students. I would love to create a short class maybe once a week for student initiation into different media platforms. Starting in possibly grade five, I would set aside maybe an hour or two in a week to dedicate to learning a new platform or media production in class then giving them the rest of the week until the next class to submit a picture or link of their work. This would make students more willing to learn new media works. I never had this introduction to multiple medias, so I was never very comfortable with learning new material at a fast pace. This is something I don’t want students of mine to go through, is just a digital age. I will like to have at least a few hours a week dedicated to learning about new medias, and being a good digital citizen, this will only become more important as time goes on.
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The insight I have about using, analyzing and creating in digital space is that we take it for granted, we don’t look at what we're doing anymore. I have had a Facebook for so many years now that I don’t stop to think that Using Facebook is a digital skill, I’m creating content. My content is personal views and stories, but its all mine, and I use the skills this class talk about every day. I never thought of these skills like digital literacy, and that is why I had so much trouble with developing my ideas for this class. I didn’t understand what counted as literacy; I forgot that it’s a personal opinion on my own skills. Digital literacy impacted my ability to work with the creative work Mindomo. These readings forced me to understand what I lacked in skill, what categories I needed to work on. Without learning on what a digital literacy learner needs to be successful, I wouldn’t be able to improve on my own skills. Without my skills, I would never be able to teach it to my students, who will need to understand how to decode (navigate, conventions, operations, stylistic, modalities) (Hinrichsen & Coombs, 2014). The last three weeks reinforced my lack of prior understanding on the subject, and I have had to work to keep learning so I could contribute to the weekly posts and not sound like I didn’t do the readings. I tried Mindomo because it reminded me of all the times I used the mind map in school on a piece of paper, I wanted to see if this work, as well as the paper version of it, did. (mindomo). I built my mind map around the idea of my resource page, which is English resources, with the focus on ESL. I chose this category because my sister who was a native English speaker needed help with her English because she was in French emersion for grade one and that put her a year behind her peers. She needed to take time with an ESL teacher, which removed her from some of her grade two classes; while it helped her, she also felt excluded from her peers. These resources would accomplish a similar goal while at home. They might have allowed her to remain with her peers, which working on fun sites at home. My awareness mainly impacted my ability to work with the digital tools, my lack of experience made it harder to not only push myself to try new things but to complete these new works successfully. The Padlet wall was strange to me, looking at others posts showed me that I could have embedded a link within my text, but I didn’t because I didn’t look for a digital tool I could use, but I also didn’t look up how to use Padlet wall. Since I chose to use Weebly as my blogging site I needed quite a bit of help to get it started, most of the resources I used were created by Weebly to help people like me get started. Bluehost made an excellent five-part YouTube series that I used to help me get started. Once I watched this series, I began to make my blog, and I was content. Until I was expected to respond to a comment on my site, which wasn’t at all straightforward. I tried to figure this out myself for around half an hour until I turned to the Weebly Help Center to see what they had to offer. After reading their comments and watching their video, I was able to find the response section of the site. These sources were incredibly helpful in my digital journey, and I recommend to look into the help center of whatever site is being used, the people who created the site want people like you to use their technology, so they will try to help you on this journey.
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Allyson DuffThird year education student at Lakehead University. Specializing in Sociology and Media Studies Archives
November 2018
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