Mapping My Digital Space!

Wow! Mapping a digital space is an awesome exercise. When I was assigned this task, I at first  thought that my map would be a bit scarce in some of the quadrants. As I started going through my apps and bookmarks, I was amazed to see that I have about the same amount in each section. I also noticed that I have come a long way. I tend to be a private person and often hesitate to share too much information digitally; yet, I do have quite a bit in the resident section.

Here is my digital space:

(Personal Photo)
Citations for the images with numbers: Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4


Digital Resident 

I am definitely a resident with various apps and sites. When I look at these, there are many that fall into either the professional or personal sides of resident. On the professional side, each app is  roughly the same size since I use them all about equally the same. These apps tend to be ones related to communicating. I use G Suite, especially Google Classroom and Gmail to communicate, collaborate, and share information with my colleagues, students and their families. Google Classroom overwhelmed me at first, but now I use it all the time at school to share with students.

I also have a Classroom Weebly page that I use to allow my students to access notes and videos from class to help with studying. I recently started recording myself giving presentations on YouTube for my students to learn.

Dropbox has been wonderful for me to store pictures and files and to then access them on any device. I use Google Drive mostly at work, but I tend to favor Dropbox more, probably since I started using that one first and have so much stored on there already! Nevertheless, I use both cloud-storage services to share files with friends and family, especially with my husband.

In the personal space for resident, one can see that I use Facebook often to interact with others. In terms of other social media sites like Snapchat and Twitter, I do not frequent them too much. I think this is because I am a part of the Facebook generation, and the other social media sites became more popular after Facebook. I have a Snapchat account, but I rarely participate in it. If I want to share photos with someone, I would prefer to do so via a text message or through Google Drive. I would rather have a record of what I send to people since Snapchat deletes pictures after a while.

Before this class, I did not have my own Twitter account, but I have occasionally read some people's tweets. With the PLN assignment, I will be using Twitter more often. At the same time, since I have been blogging more with this class, I have Blogger on the resident side but a bit smaller than some of the others since this is a newer tool for me.

Digital Visitor 

In regards to the apps and sites that I put on the visitor side, these are mostly sites that I use to purchase materials that I need either personally or professionally.

I certainly love Amazon Prime for both school and home! Being able to order certain items online and receive them in 2 days has been a huge time saver! TeachersPayTeachers is a site I visit often. There are so many engaging projects and activities on there that I have used as supplements to the units I am teaching. There are original activities I have created, and my goal is to start selling these on this site sometime soon. By doing so, I will become more of a resident with this site.

 And while I like some of the ideas I have received from Pinterest, the site overwhelms me. I think this is because this site was giving me too many ideas for my wedding, and it all just got to be too much!! I am rather crafty though, so I should start sharing some of my ideas with Pinterest.

Closing Thoughts 

Overall, this mapping activity has made me realize that while I have come a long way in terms of using the digital world to share and interact with others, I seem to use the Internet as a digital tool quite a bit as opposed to a place to grow as an individual. I want to continue to push myself to use it as a way to share with others, especially to benefit myself as a teacher, and I feel that this course has been helping me to move more into this territory.

My brother always said that we cannot shy away from technology. In order to survive, we have to keep up with the new advances. This rings true for me now with this exercise as I need to immerse myself more into these new advancements in order to gain all that they have to offer to help me to learn and grow.