This post is the ePortfolios class assignment.

I explored a couple of ePortfolio sites. I looked at ePortfolio.org. Unfortunately, this site is no longer accepting new accounts or renewals. I also played a little bit with Adobe's Creative Cloud and Behance, however it seemed geared more towards Digital Artists and Illustrators. I also looked at desire2learn.com. After reading some of the posts in the ePortfolio Tool Q&A, I decide to try Portfoliogen. I found this to be a very easy to use and educator oriented. Thanks Classmates!

Here is my link on Portfoliogen:

http://www.portfoliogen.com/DavidMTyler/

Some of the affordances of this tool that I see are:

1. The ease of use - you don't need to know HTML or website design.
2. It gear toward the educational community.
3. It is free!
4. For a small annual fee, you can expand it capabilites.
5. It's web-based. Any one with a web brower can view it. I tried it on several different platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile phone) .

Tech Play 1 - Blog

Content – The student work I would be addressing is basic computer technology.  I would start with Basic computer theory.  This blog would be a way for me to communicate and reinforce what I presented in previous lessons with my students.  I would be a means of communicating to those who use this technology on a daily basis and need to achieve a deeper understanding of how computers and their attached peripherals talk to each other.  I would also address how information is transferred from one computer to the other on the internet and more.  The blog would be a way to communicate in an informal setting other than the traditional classroom.  The level of understanding that I would be trying to achieve would be Comprehension where the students would be able state the main ideas behind computer technology and summarize the basic technology that enables computers to communicate.

Pedagogy – I am developing into a strong supporter of the Constructivism learning theory.  For this Tech Play / Use of Technology for Education, I believe that the Constructivism learning theories would play an important role in this use of this technology.  Students today live in a digital environment where just about everything that they use in their daily lives is a type of digital technology.  By using a technology such as blogging, that is used in some form or fashion by many people (Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, Intragram are all forms of blogging just to name a few) and especially Students (even the Baby Boomer generation uses Facebook) my Pedagogy would be to build on any existing knowledge of technology in the form of educating my students on what happens on the backend of a technology that they are already using many times a day.  With this pedagogy, I would incorporate Active Learning by including ways to ping an IP Address of another computer, Discovery Learning by giving my students links to research and Knowledge Building from what they would learning from my blog.

Technology – The affordances of a Blog site can be the communication between student and teacher, student to student, and parent to teacher.  Also information sharing between all of the parties, visual information sharing in the form of videos and pictures, and links to other websites with pertinent information.  Additionally, collaboration between students on projects and possibly parents becoming involve in this informal interaction.  Blog sites are informal by design; therefore the off-the-record interaction can be both positive and negative.  Students may feel a certain freedom to interact with the instructor in a way that they would not do in a formal classroom setting.  However, some students or even parents may take this as an opportunity to express disrespect and lambaste the instructor, other students or even other parents for what may be a difference in opinion.  Nevertheless, the affordances of open exchange of information out way the potential negative possibilities.