Blog #11 Creating a Wiki

I have been using wikis for long time, I have always liked how easy to read and how informative they are. A lot of questions come in my mind every day like how things work or what some things mean and most importantly, who people are. I find most of this information on wikis. I watch sports and most of the information about players, coaches and clubs are there as a wiki.

Creating a wiki is so different than just reading it, and now I know how much effort some people have done to make a useful wiki.  Designing the wiki to be helpful and to put the right information in the right place it the most frustrating thing I have faced with my wiki.

I really don’t know how I will use the wiki in the future, but with skills I have learned in this class I might build one or contribute for some of my favorite things.

In my profession, wikis are mostly used to identify some differences between devices and technologies and that is one of the things I am hoping to do some day which is building a wiki that people can use and benefit from.

Blog #10 Your Selected Technology

Evernote is a great way to store, share and view our files on the cloud. Yes it may seem like it has some features like what other websites or tools has, but Evernote is actually way better in different ways.

I would like to share some of the great features that Evernote has, which I think are very useful.

A great tool that is included in Evernote is the text recognition, and it is called “Optical Character Recognition technology”. This technology allows us to search for texts that are inside the images. Sometimes people start looking for a specific picture or image that has a text they need and this technology will certainly help.

Another great use of Evernote, which I personally use is the use of to-do-lists, and grocery list. Sometimes I remember something I would like to buy from the grocery store list and I just add it to the note in my laptop through Evernote and I can find it and access it through my phone any time when I am in the store.

While researching Evernote, I have seen people talking about Evernote and how they are benefiting from it with using it for different uses like a reminder, fitness and exercise notes and some people use it for saving and maintain their own and their children’s clothing sizes and measurements.

Blog #9 Analyzing Your PLN

By looking at my Professional Learning Network (PLN), I can see how beneficial it is. On the second week of this course I followed a page and found someone who posts some very useful tools and tips regarding computer networking. So now I added him to my PLN and I think that it will get bigger and I can benefit more from it and support my professional goals.

The topics in my PLN are mostly computer networking or technology related topics. For example, configuring a Wireless Router, Unix and Linux commands and network security.

For now, I have seven companies in my PLN, most of them are specialized in computer networking but all discuss and deal with other technologies. The companies I have in my PLN are Juniper, Cisco, VMware, NetGear, HTC, Google and D-Link.

Basically, Cisco, Juniper, D-link and NetGear are all specialized in computer networking technology. While VMware are focusing in the virtual computing, and HTC for the Mobile world and finally Google that it related to all technologies especially the web technologies.

I have 24 people in my PLN and they are mostly my classmates, but I also have some other people and other pages that I think are important to have them in my PLN. For instance, SecMash (@SecMash) is a great page for getting new news about computer security. Matt Wilson (@mattwilson9090) puts some great articles about the technology nowadays, and Cristian Romero (@romeroc24) who is a blogger and also has a great collection of very useful networking and technology related YouTube videos.

Cisco Networking academy and Khan Academy are two organizations that I highly recommend for any student. Cisco Networking academy is just focused on computer and networking, however, Khan Academy is all about everything in the education world.

I think that I do need more people, organizations and companies in my PLN. The reason is no matter how professional the people or the companies are, they might be somewhat biased toward certain technologies or have not had an experience with other similar technologies, therefore, I might get misguided if I only look at things through someone else’s opinion.

Blog #8 Your Selected Technology

Your Selected Technology 

Evernote is a great tool that offers way more than what it sounds like. I want to talk about what really drew me to the tool. I have used Evernote once around three years ago as part of a class assignment; I do not remember anything about it because we only had to use it once to share some documents with our instructor. However, while looking for a tool to write about for this class, I found a familiar name and did a small research on it. I cannot explain how surprised I was when I found what Evernote is capable of. I am a person who loves the convince of technology, the ability to have my files whenever and wherever I want and with Evernote, it will be a great choice for me especially if I am working on a school related document or even a project, survey or anything that I need to share with my classmate or my school. I find Evernote more interesting since I have the ability to share pictures, audio and video along with documents and truly any file type out there.

Blog #7 Choose Your Own Topic

I would like to write about some of the things I have discovered through this course.

For a start, I have never heard of Professional Learning Network “PLN” before taking this class. Sure I knew what social media is all about and I also knew that LinkedIn for example is more formal and professional than some websites like Facebook and Twitter, but I have never known what PLN is and how am I going to benefit from it.

I learned that PLN is one very important tool to participate with helping or learning from other people whom share the same interest we have. No matter if we use Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other website, PLN is a huge collection of resources combined together from different places and different website to serve the same goal.

Another thing I gained more knowledge on is Blogging, I have never thought of how important and useful blogging is before having this opportunity in this class. I really found some very helpful and interesting ideas giving by my classmates “the readers”. I really hope that I can learn more and become better at this and wish that more people can benefit from these powerful learning tools.

Blog #6 Growing Your PLN

LinkedIn is a special social networking tool, it differs than most of the other website because it is almost formal and more professional than other non-professional websites like Facebook where people add pictures of their trips, pest or themselves and share it with family and other friends.

On LinkedIn, I have chosen to connect with or follow Cisco and Cisco Networking Academy. Cisco is the leading computer networking company. The reason why I chose Cisco and their Cisco Networking Academy over other LinkedIn profiles is that this company’s profile is always up to date; they always update and post something new every few days and people are commenting almost every day. My associate degree was in computer networking, and in order for me to maintain my knowledge, I would have to be close to the ones who know more and can enlighten me with more knowledge.

Twitter on the other hand is different than LinkedIn; it doesn’t have the same amount of information about the person you want to follow and obviously allows only 140 words. Some people or companies uses a link to their website when they need to write something that require more than 140 words, like articles.

On Twitter, I decided to follow Cisco Networking Academy, they have a great Twitter profile with updates every 2 to 6 tweets a day. Their tweets seemed very helpful in terms of news, tips and information. They also provide some useful resources and tell you what you may have been missing, for example, applications and software for their academy alumni.

Blog #5 Evernote

I have chosen Evernote for the class’s wiki page. We live in the world of internet, with a lot of people always connected to the Internet. People are getting involved with whatever useful technology they get introduced to, like email, sharing videos, photos, music, watching or reading news and managing their finances.

A lot of people nowadays have some shared information between their devices like their computer and their smart phone so they can access their information anytime.

Evernote is one of the powerful tools for an everyday use. It gives us the ability to share almost any information across our devices. Evernote is great for a sharing a lot of things especially photos, videos, audio and notes. Not only that we can share all these things across our devices, but we can also share what we want with whoever we want and stop sharing whenever we want, and the only thing we need to is an Internet connection and a computer, smartphone or a tablet.

A great example is when someone writes a document on his or her computer, and whenever he or she needed this information while outside the house, Evernote will give the opportunity to access the document on any smartphone, tablet or other computers.

With over 100 million users, more people rely and trust Evernote more than any other competitors.