Task 2 Research

Task 2 required me to research and use a social media site that would support a personally chosen social event; teach a peer how to use my site; and review and contribute to a peers social space. To begin I must choose a social event/group such as an online book club, mothers group, or sporting site. Then, I need to research social media sites that would be relevant to present my situation, choose one and justify why I chose the particular technology. The final step is to create a set of multimedia 'how to' instructions with both written text and screen captures, clear enough for a peer to access and contribute to my site.

I first looked through the unit book Meaningful Learning with Technology (Herrington & Parker, 2014) at chapter 2, Inquiring with Technologies. I found it really useful as someone who was about to embark on research and also from a future teaching aspect when requiring students to complete research tasks. whilst reading the second paragraph under 'Information Gathering with Internet Resources' on page 22, I found myself thinking back on when I was a student research in the library and how I never really learnt anything during these exercises. As outlined in the book and what I remember myself doing, if you are searching for answers on the internet to answer a set of questions from your teacher, you are focusing on completing the assignment (and quickly for that matter) and this does not really result in learning. I loved that as I read this chapter, I could reflect back and use my experience to say to myself I do not want to put my students in this sort of situation in my classroom as it shows that I have not learnt from my own experiences or taken on board what is confirmed in a book. It is put nicely in this text as taken from Jonassen and Colaric (2001), that research is a four step process. These four steps are: plan, use strategies to search the Web, evaluate and triangulate sources. I have in mind for my future teaching, that I would like to teach this sort of process before I put students into a research project. I do not want them racing to complete an assignment but rather learning as they go and become competent in searching the internet - there are so many millions of answers and results out there that you need to understand how to identify what you need to look for.

I am loving the fact that these tasks keep on challenging me to use new technologies. Initially I looked at using Diigo for my social networking space however, I felt that the layout and ease of navigation was not best suited to what I wanted. There was not many options for personalising the page or organising discussion topics. I felt that if I used this technology, it would become difficult to find discussions and information would get lost as more posts went up.

I tried Google searching various mothers groups to see what sort of technology was most commonly used. It seems Facebook is right up there as it can be set up through your personal page. The other popular option was to have the group presented as a website rather than a blog or community. As I have already created a blog and website for task 1 I want to stay away from using technology that I have already been exposed to.

The most viable option that I found through a Google search was to create a Google Community where I can communicate and share with people who have the same interests as me.

At the moment I am at the stage of exploring how to use Google communities and the various features it provides.

I'll be back soon with an update of what I'm learning and how the task is progressing :)