What?

In our first vir­tu­al online meet­ing for our cohort we cov­ered a lot of infor­ma­tion. We start­ed by intro­duc­ing our­selves to the oth­er cohort mem­bers and end­ed by break­ing out into side rooms on Zoom to chat a lit­tle more per­son­ably and reflect on a some of what we learned. The course out­line and syl­labus were pre­sent­ed, along with an assort­ment of new soft­ware pro­grams which Dr. Michael Paske­vi­sius rec­om­mend­ed as use­ful (and pos­si­bly crit­i­cal) for not only this course but through­out our jour­ney towards achiev­ing our Mas­ters degree.

So What?

Per­haps the most essen­tial aspect I took away from this first class was the vast array of soft­ware pro­grams that were pre­sent­ed which I have nev­er even heard.

• Mat­ter­most - A plat­form for col­lab­o­rat­ing via an Instant Mes­sen­ger style plat­form.
• Zotero - a free, easy-to-use tool to help you col­lect, orga­nize, anno­tate, cite, and share research.
• Word Press / OpenETC — A web­site builder pri­mar­i­ly used for Blogs.
• Hypothes.is — A plat­form used to anno­tate a vari­ety of mate­ri­als and share/collaborate with oth­ers.
• Microsoft 365 — An online ver­sion of the pow­er­ful Microsoft Office suite avail­able to UVic stu­dents.
• JSTOR - The online proxy acces­si­bil­i­ty of the UVic Library.
• Write Online — Appears to be a great resource for aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing.
• Unsplash - Over 3 mil­lion free high-res­o­lu­tion images brought to you by the world’s most gen­er­ous com­mu­ni­ty of pho­tog­ra­phers.

Now What?

After an ini­tial pow­er­ful over­whelm­ing feel­ing towards all of these plat­forms and resources I am now start­ing to watch videos and read arti­cles on how to actu­al­ly use them. At first glance, these all seem to be great­ly use­ful and pow­er­ful plat­forms that will enable us to fur­ther research, orga­nize, anno­tate, cite and col­lab­o­rate our work with each oth­er towards achiev­ing our essen­tial goal of becom­ing more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly flu­ent in our edu­ca­tion­al set­tings. The com­plete­ly over­whelmed feel­ing has sub­sided a bit but there is still lots more to learn about these plat­forms before becom­ing com­fort­able with them. One step at a time and I will get there!