EDIT 4300 Gloria's Blog

Week 15

This is officially the last post I'll be writing in this blog.

I've been working on my portfolio for the past couple of weeks and decided to finally sit down and finish the last page required, the resources. Throughout the course, I made a list of all the resources we used/saw/encountered, and there were so many. There are so many resources out there for us to use, yet I find myself going back to the same ones. For example, I used Canva throughout this semester, even for my other classes and personal use.

Overall, I had a lot of fun creating this portfolio, as I did with every other assignment and week this semester. Everything I learned this semester is invaluable to me and I hope I incorporate bits and pieces into all of my future lesson plans. 

I hope that as time passes and new technology surfaces, that I will not be afraid to learn and try the new programs out. One of my fears is to get left behind in the technology world, so I hope that I will continue to be curious and have that fire and motivation to learn new things in this IT-filled world.

As I embark on this new journey as a MSN, Ed. I hope to never be afraid, and like Theodore Roosevelt said, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

Thank you Professor Rubal for teaching me everything IT related this semester and for making each week fun.

Week 14

This is the second to last blog post that I'll be writing for this class. It's both exciting that I'm done with my MSN program and will be walking across that stage next Wednesday and a little sad that I won't have these fun assignments to do anymore.

This week was indeed another fun week. I do wish I was able to add this assignment into the actual lesson plan, it would have been fun (for me). Maybe not so much for the "students" in the class. Again, this assignment makes me think of how I'll be able to use it in nursing education. Although puzzles and crosswords are fun, I don't think they'll work too well with nursing. Kahoot, however, may work! We did use this game and tested it out in our NURS 5602 class. We built 5 question quizzes and everyone downloaded the app and played for about an hour. We didn't notice the time pass by. The only downside was the limited characters the quiz creator had for the questions.

For the professional organization survey, I chose American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA). I had a hard time deciding whether it was a professional IT organization. I knew it was a professional organization available to nurses and other healthcare professionals, but wasn't sure if IT and informatics were related. After much research, and conflicting information, I think IT is more of an umbrella term of technology and informatics is a specific branch of technology under this umbrella.

I'm a little doubtful on my choice for the professional organization, but hope my assignment is done correctly.

One more week to go.

Week 13

Today was an overall good day.

Surprisingly, I really like computational thinking. Some of it is repetitive work, but it's amazing to see how far the computer has come to do a lot of this for us as long someone puts in the coding properly. There's so much to computational thinking, and I like the challenge of learning something knew. I honestly can't believe that I know the basics of coding and that I was able to successfully complete the JAVA extra credit assignment.

I've actually never really learned how to "officially" use Excel or spreadsheet other than to have a compiled class roster or a sign up sheet. I found the sum, average, min, max functions fairly easy to use. However, I came across a problem when trying to find a function to change the percentage grade to a letter grade. I attempted to use the one in the PDF file, and it came up as an error, so I did a google search and found: =VLOOKUP($I7,{0,"F";65,"D";70,"C";80,"B";90,"A"},2) and I'm not even sure if this is right, but it worked!

I had a slightly more difficult time with the second assignment because I didn't know how to input the function, but thanks to Google, I figured it fairly easily. Hopefully, I did the CountIf column correctly.

Week 12

Every week, we are given a new challenge or a new program to play with. This week's was Adobe Spark. There's always pros and cons with each application or program, and I had a couple with Adobe Spark right off the bat. I actually downloaded the app and played with it on my phone. Some things I couldn't adjust to on the app was the font, font size, and I couldn't cut music out when I wanted to. However, the app was very simple and easy to adjust to. I'm definitely going to have to play around with web page to give it a more detailed/thorough review.

Week 11

I usually do all of my EDIT homework/assignments on Monday, but I needed a little break from school after two weeks of comprehensive nursing exams. It consisted on an essay portion where we had three hours to write a six page paper. That was stressful, and then this week, we had a comprehensive multiple choice exam. I feel like I still need to catch up on sleep.

Like every week, this week's class was very interesting. Virtual reality is something that exploded in popularity just a few years back (if I'm remembering correctly). I know in Korea, they have VR "cafes." It seems like it's a bit more active than the normal drinking a cup of coffee. I'm heading to Korea in October, so if I get a chance, I might drop by to see what this is all about.


Screencast is such an interesting program to use. I was also playing around with the Screencastify plugin and noticed that you can record you desktop screen and your webcam as well. Is this what gamers use to record and upload to YouTube? I feel like that's what I've always known it as. This is definitely an important tool to use for an instructor that is primarily teaching in an online setting. I am starting to wonder if there are ways to incorporate this into a regular face-to-face setting.

P.S. I honestly love this class so much and look forward to it every week.

Week 10

First of all, I can't believe it's already week 10! Time flew by so fast.

This week is on a topic that I am very passionate about. As mentioned in the introduction post, I have my own YouTube channel that focuses on beauty/makeup. I got into making videos because I wanted to try something new and something that was out of my comfort zone. I would create content all day, edit throughout the night and post my videos up all within 24 hours. Once I started the Masters program, I went on a hiatus.

I haven't done my voice recording of the quote yet, but it's interesting to see the different online programs out there because I've always used my iPhone voice memo to record voice overs for my videos. The quality of voice memo actually surprised me quite a bit when I first used it.


Subbing videos is a whole different story. I was getting slightly frustrated because at some points, I couldn't make out what the gentleman was saying. I eventually brought the speed of the video to 0.5 and played it, paused it, and played it over again. This short clip took much longer than I expected. I give major props to all those people to sub Japanese anime or Korean dramas. Because I'm Korean and understand/speak Korean, I never appreciated people that took the time to sub each hour long video. It's hard work!

My subbed video for this week's assignment.
CDCDEMO

Week 9

Social media is becoming a crucial part of every day life. Toddlers are given iPads and elementary school students are walking around with smart phones. Looking at it from one perspective, what is society teaching the future generations? But also taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, it is what the future is going to consist of, so why not use it for education?

Week 8

Computational Thinking (CT)... Wow.

We got a brief overview in week 2, but I didn't fully understand the concept until this week. Ultimately, CT breaks down a problem. According to Google, it uses pattern recognition to identify similarities and differences. According to Code, binary images and algorithms are categorized under CT.

According to Code, all information can be coded in binary numbers. It's just a matter of figuring out how. The example that was shown in one of Code's videos was an example of a panda image. It was taken from a photo and was converted into a black and white grid image and ultimately converted to 0's and 1's. In class, our binary number assignment in week 2 was writing our favorite color using the binary alphabet. This week, we had to figure out everyone's favorite colors based off of the binary numbers written and answer a couple questions. Towards the end, I started to recognize some letters and it was a lot faster to decipher.

Another thing I learned this week was that algorithms are used in every day life. We use algorithms to  break down larger/complicated topics to smaller and simpler steps. An example provided by Code's was a recipe. But another algorithm we use on a daily basis these days is the navigation system. It is built to breakdown the route in a step-by-step process.

This week we took an image of a dog and wrote an algorithm for it. After writing out the algorithm, I tested it on my dad, and he was able to follow it perfectly.
Lastly, I tested out the JAVA extra credit today, and to my surprise it worked! It wasn't too difficult to follow after I watched the demonstration in this week's video. But when I initially opened it yesterday, all the different codes were very intimidating, so that's why I decided to try again today. It was a success!

Week 7

I think my all time favorite website to be on these days is Canva. I used it for the past week and a half to create my lesson plan, and it was the easiest program to navigate and adapt to. I actually went ahead and signed up for Piktochart and Easel.ly as well but ended up deactivating my account about an hour after playing around with each. The later two programs were unrealistic for me and most of the options weren't what I was looking for. The programs were so busy and templates were so difficult to work with. I really wish there are more all-inclusive programs like Canva out. 

Week 6

Week 5

This week was a continuation of last week as we continued to work on the infograph as a class. I know we started off by using the collaborative Google document, but as time went on, classmates started making their own Google draw page, so it got a little confusing as to which one we were using  or putting our codes on. Eventually, I figured it out, but it made me realize that communication is key. Classmates referred to a green box without stating which document the box could be found, so it was just a matter of searching through all the files.