Digital Fitness Assessment

I really enjoy looking at the content the app has for educators. I found an interesting article on using social media in the classroom. As a mother, I love receiving photos from my daughter’s teacher about her day at school. It makes me feel involved in her day at school. As a teacher, I’ve tried to do the same but found that it can be very time consuming to send photos to each parent. The article gave me the idea of starting a social media account for my students and their families. The memories that I will be able to collect and share with my students and their families will be priceless.

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Use of the digital fitness app is mandated by our company to keep us up to date with our digital skills. Unfortunately, the app is very slow, and super buggy. Often, the app won’t recognize the time you spent while going through a module. Text frequently runs together, squishing words, or has awkward gaps in words, and sometimes impossible-to-ready, tiny text. The content is mediocre and way too high level. It’s super obvious stuff that I am already very familiar with as a result of my job in IT or stuff I read about on tech news outlets. If the developer took some time to tighten up the backend calls the app is making, eliminate the bugs, slow responsiveness, fixed the awful text formatting, and produced more in-depth, fresh content, this app could potentially be more valuable.

I have really come to like the "Content for Educators" section as I feel that this is most suited to fit my needs and give me ideas about how to increase the technology usage in my classroom. My favorite article is "An Educator's Guide to Setting up Virtual Field Trips" because I believe that in order for our students to have the best education possible, we need to expand beyond the school walls and help them to experience things they have never experienced before.

I love that there are multiple modalities for exploring tech-forward information. While scrolling through the countless options, the first video that peaked my interest was titled, “Why You Should Make Useless Things”. The speaker, Simone Giertz, is engaging and hilarious. She makes failure FUN. It takes courage to move forward with a “useless” project. By doing this, you can erase the pressure to perform and, rather, work to expand your mindset.

This is an excellent concept and it’s well executed. The app walks you through a series of questions to assess how plugged in you are to the rapidly changing digital economy. One glaring gap is that the articles they provide are limited to TED talks. Nothing against TED talks but there is more out there than these 8 min videos. In fact I don’t listen to podcasts if the are not more than 1 hour. All the reading you do on LinkedIn etc does not count towards this gamified platform. It’s a great start!