ETEC527 Twitter Blog Post

 I never had a Twitter account prior to this class. I actually only created the Twitter account so that I can hopefully get a decent grade in this class.  My Twitter handle is @GJordan4class.  This link will take you directly to my Twitter home page. Twitter Home for GJordan  You can see my attempts at making posts there.

I am not a social media junky and typically avoid everything but Facebook. I even limit my time on Facebook!  I spend all my free time working on Graduate School assignments. 

In setting up the account I decided to simply use my first initial, last name, & #4 then the word class. It was something simple that I could remember & in another way it was my rebellious was of letting everyone know the account is only for this one class.  I intend to delete just as soon as the class ends.

The majority of my high school students do not use Twitter. I actually asked them when I found out about the assignment. They prefer to use Instagram & Snap Chat. The ones that I spoke with said that Twitter and Facebook are for old people.  There were a couple of the seniors that said they had used Twitter prior to Elon Musk buying it, but because of his narrow minded views they chose to delete their accounts. Can't say that I blame them!

When I was trying to learn what to do in Twitter I ended up asking the "All knowing Google" for assistance. Google came up with step by step directions for me, which helped lessen my anxiety. 

I can actually see the benefit of using this platform to provide students with resources for learning, such as the videos that Dr. B tweeted to us. But at the high school level we are still required to put everything into Google Classroom. So until the school district changes its views on what we should use in the classroom we will not be using Twitter. Sorry Dr. B!

In addition to working on Twitter this week, we were assigned a group project to develop a Web 2.0 Technology Evaluation Rubric. You can view the rubric here: Rubric   I hope that it makes sense to everyone.

Thank you for reading my post for this week!  

Spring Semester ETEC527, Vanity Search

Completing this Blog is part of a continuing class assignment for ETEC527, Web 2.0 Technologies for Instruction.

Part of our assignment this week was to set up a Blog account, Google account, and a Twitter account.  Luckily I had not deleted this Blog which I started in a previous semester as an assignment. I also had a Google account (truth be told I have several of those since I use them for personal, work, and grad school). I begrudgingly set up a Twitter account so that I can hopefully make a decent grade in this course. I have never had an interest in Twitter, and I will be deactivating the account when this class ends.

In addition to the tasks listed above, we were to do a Vanity search using Google. I never realized that there were so many people in the United States that I share a name with.  I also never realized how much factual information about me is out there on the internet.  I was relieved to see that there was only one picture of me that appeared when I did the search. The other pictures were of the people who share the same name with me. The one picture I found was published by the National Academy Foundation (NAF) when I had participated in a technology program. The most disturbing part of this vanity search was seeing how many times my name popped up. I found my name listed on 6 different web sites, and a couple of those sites had me listed more than one time. One of the sites has me listed as living in the wrong town, but it has my correct cell phone number posted for the whole world to see.

I am thankful that I did not find a bunch of pictures floating around on the web. But on the other hand I am appalled at the amount of factual information that is there for anyone to make use of. I work hard to protect myself. I never post pictures of myself. I refuse to use cash apps or fill out information from my cell phone. I have heard commercials about helping people remove their information from web sites.  After doing this assignment, perhaps I should research how to best do that.