Social Media Etiquette

Class Look Back

In this class, I have learned the benefits of building and utilizing a personal learning network in order to help further my career if I need help or can provide help to another person. This class has provided me with valuable information in utilizing social media as well as other web tools to help me in my future career as a manager. I have also learned how to tell a good website from the bad ones, so in the future, if I am tasked with managing the design of a website I will know specifically what needs to be added to ensure that the website would be successful. Some tools that I learned about in this class through the smackdowns were: Instagram for businesses, Wordpress, different functions on Gmail, and a bunch of calendar apps that could be useful in my future career for keeping track of important deadlines and meetings about important projects. I learned to utilize the new functions that I learned about Gmail so I can easily sort my emails, so when I need to find something I can do it with ease. I enjoyed the class the way it was structured and all of the assignments were great is teaching the content of the class because instead of just reading about the content we also got chances to apply them throughout the course and smackdowns.

Good V.S. Bad Websites Smackdown

The websites that I chose to showcase in my smackdown exemplify good and bad websites. This is due to the fact that they may or may not meet the following criteria which makes a website good or not. In order for a website to be good, some of the criteria that it must possess are: moderation, easy to use, phenomenal content, and striking colors. In my Smackdown Play Big Zone exemplified that criteria making it superior to its competition iPlay America. Play Big Zone's website is not overly cluttered with information, pictures, videos, or ads unlike iPlay America. It is a nice clean cut website that allows users to find the information they need. Since their website is not cluttered it aids in the ease of use because they have a simple navigation bar that clearly defines what information you will find on those pages. Additionally, it does not have navigation tabs that have multiple choices making it more difficult to navigate and find information, which is something that iPlay America has making their website more difficult to navigate. Furthermore, Play Big Zone's website has nice bright and vibrant colors that captures the user's attention while iPlay America's website is dark with hints of red popping in here and there throughout the website. Play Big Zone has almost been open for a year and their website is superior to iPlay America's who has been around longer and is the more established business.

The video contains the presentation and the video of the websites

Social Media Tools

LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a powerful networking tool which is an invaluable resource that can be used to aid a person in finding and getting a job. This caught my eye because a site like this allows people who are looking for jobs or just looking to get their name and business out there to easily connect with people from different businesses in order to help them in the future. I chose this because as a future manager I feel that this site would allow me to reach out and meet people from different businesses around the world in order to help further my career as well as aid me in finding the right candidates to hire. I would use LinkedIn, especially for the hiring process because it gives me the ability to see where the candidate has worked before as well as some other personal information about them. Additionally, when I start my career LinkedIn would serve to allow me to get my name out there and meet new people who could potentially hire me as a manager.

Grab In Box:

Grab In Box is a tool that allows you to post on multiple platforms from one site saving you time from having you create the same post multiple times for each social media site. This caught my eye because if I manage a marketing team in this day and age social media is a powerful tool in marketing, so with this tool it would easily allow my team and I to make one post to be published on all social media sites. I chose this site because it allows for time to be saved when marketing products. This site cuts out the unnecessary steps of recreating the same posts for different social media sites in order to advertise the same product. I would use Grab In Box because it would be an invaluable web tool to have since it effectively streamlines the ability to make posts for social media across multiple platforms quickly.

Facebook Business Manager:
Facebook Business Manager is a great tool that allows for the management of your ads, pages, apps, and the people who work on them all from one place. This caught my eye because a site like this allows for simplicity in managing multiple aspects of a business account from one place. I chose this because as a future manager this would allow me to easily manage the business's Facebook page as well as all of the active ads that are running on the page. I would use this because it allows me to manage all aspects of the companies advertising as well as its presence on Facebook.

Storyboards

The first 3 are from storyboard that, the 4th one is from Pixton, and the last one is from PicLit.

 This is when I went to pick up the first car I bought

I love taking cruises 

 This is me bored out of my mind social distancing

 This is when I was 5 and visited my Uncles farm for the first time

This is a quote I like from Ferris Bullers Day Off and is one that I try to live by.

Web Tool Smack down

For my web tool, I chose Skype because it is a great app that allows for easy and simple communication with other people. Skype has multiple different ways to communicate with people from anywhere around the world at any time. Most of these features are free, but there is one service that they offer that is a monthly subscription. You can create meetings with as many people as you want in just 3 simple steps. All you have to do is click the start meeting button, click share invite, and select the people you want in the video call and you are done. Skype makes it as simple and easy as possible when it comes to communicating with others. Furthermore, you can do the chat feature you can have a group chat or just message individual people where you can go over things that need to be done or just to communicate through in a less formal structure like email. The last feature that they offer is the monthly subscription to obtain a phone number through skype where they can receive and make called to any cell phone or landline anywhere in the world.

All of these features will be extremely useful in my career as a manager because as a manager you must be able to communicate clearly and quickly in order to complete the task at hand. The meeting video chat is useful since it allows you to conference with people who may work in different buildings around the world. A reason for doing something like this would be if you are working on a project together and you need to communicate your research and other findings to one another in order to complete the project. The same goes for the chat feature whether it is a group chat or and individual chat it allows the managers to quickly communicate with the various members of their team and share information that is relevant to the project. Communication is key in management and the quicker and easier one is able to communicate the better the business will be since they will be able to get more done. Lastly, the paid subscription is extremely useful because if I have to travel a lot for my future career if I have to visit other teams in offices around the world them obtaining a phone number through skype to make and receive calls from anyone is great. If you were to purchase an international phone plan from your provider it would be extremely expensive, but skype offers it for a low monthly rate. This would allow me to stay in touch with my home team while I travel to these other teams to ensure everything is being done correctly to complete the project.

The Connected Educator Chapter 4 Summary

Chapter 4 of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall's The Connecter Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age discusses the importance of working together, forming trusts and transparency with one another in order to foster a better relationship while working together to reach the overall goal. There are many aspects that they touch on in order to establish the deep relationship that they talk about. Trust and transparency were some of the big ones that they discussed. Obviously, when working with another person on a project you have to trust them otherwise problems between each person could arise since you do not trust them. Transparency goes hand in hand with trust because if you do not trust the person you are working with then you will not be transparent with them when it comes to relaying information regarding the project to them. Another factor that they cover is storming. Storming is when people begin to disagree and get frustrated with the time it takes to learn something new. "...educators are not told that this is a normal part of the connected learning community growth process, they give up prematurely, assuming this is one more professional development strategy that does not work" (Nusbaum-Beach and Hall 67). These are some of the most crucial aspects that are part of building a collaborative culture.

The use of trust and transparency along with other aspects that Nussbaum-Beach and Hall describe would benefit me in my future career as a manager because as a manager I need to be able to trust the people that are a part of my team. If we are working on a project I need to know that I can count on them to get the work done on their own and I do not have to be that guy that has to micro-manage people. Transparency is the same thing, I need to be transparent with my team when issues arise and they also have to be transparent with me if they have any concerns or issues in order to ensure that everyone on the team can foster the deep relationship that Nussbaum-Beach and Hall describe. This deep relationship will benefit the team and will be the reason that everyone will work well together and no one would have to micro-manage or have issues with another person on the team.


"Building a Collaborative Culture." The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, by Seryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, Solution Tree Press, 2012, pp. 57-71.

Social Media Smackdown

I chose Instagram for my social media smackdown project because I believe that it provides the most benefit to businesses that are trying to market their products to new audiences. Instagram provides features specifically for the purpose of advertising products. A business can make a free business account giving them access to analytics, promotion of posts, ad creating, and displaying all business information. On the analytics side of things, Instagram provides the business with insights into their stories, posts, and followers allowing them to see who views what and what the demographics viewing it is. It does not stop there. Once a business decides to promote a post, Instagram provides real-time data to show the business how the prompted post or story is doing throughout the day, allowing them to decide if it is worth continuing to promote the post or not. Now that I mentioned promoting a post, let me explain what that is. One of the features that you have access to as a business account is for a fee to pay to have your post pushed as an advertisement on to other people's timelines. This allows for whatever you are promoting to reach more people and potentially boost sales and gain new followers. Additionally, Instagram provides a way for the business and customers to interact. This can be if a customer has questions and business can answer them right there or if customers are giving feedback, it allows the business to see and address what the customers are saying.

This would benefit me in my future career as a manager because one of the potential paths I could follow would be to oversee a marketing team. One of the tools that we could use would be Instagram because of the number of people who use it and the convenience and simplicity that it provides. With all of the features that Instagram provides, it would allow for any marketing team to gauge whether they should continue to push the promoted product and knowing if the post is doing well on Instagram as a business we could check our website and see if there is an increase in traffic and sales. If there are then that could be attributed to the advertising work that is being conducted on Instagram. The more people the promoted posts or ads reach the more potential sales and customers we would receive which would allow for the business to become more successful. As a manager, it would be up to me to make sure that these campaigns are successful in order to help the business grow.

The Connected Educator Chapter 5 Summary

Chapter 5 of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall's The Connecter Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age discusses the importance of using social bookmarking in order to filter information so that it is relevant to what you search for. There are many different sites to use in order to filter through all of the different sites online for your convenience. Additionally, there are many different tools in order to connect and collaborate with people in your personal learning network. some of the tools are bogs, microblogs, RSS readers, podcasts, wikis, and google docs. All in an effort to maintain one's reputation on a professional level to aid in networking and establishing a strong online presence. "The Twitter website is a good resource for connecting and collaborating with educators" (Nussbaum-Beach and Hall 82). Twitter is one of the most popularly used microblogs and it requires the least amount of time to invest. One of the most important aspects of Twitter is its use of hashtags to tag tweets with. It allows for the tweet to easily be found through search with people who have common interests.

The use of filtering through information and different tools that Nussbaum-Beach and Hall describe would benefit me in my future career as a manager because it would allow for new ways to network myself to different people while also learning new information from these people. As a manager communication is everything, so and easy way to communicate while building a strong online presence is crucial. Twitter would be an excellent app to use since it requires the least amount of time, is easy to sort through, and puts everything in chronological order regarding tweets from people that you follow. The easy line of communication allows me to interact with people all over the world and gain valuable knowledge from them. Additionally, another tool that would be good to use as a manager is google drive. Google drive allows for easy access to documents from any computer anywhere, it even allows for easy document sharing with people.  As a manager, this would allow me to easily disperse pertinent documents to the people that I oversee in order for fast and easy communication. 

"Using Tools to Support Connected Learning." The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, by Seryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, Solution Tree Press, 2012, pp. 73-89.

The Connected Educator Chapter 6 Summary

Chapter 6 of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall's The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age discusses the importance of building a connected learning community. These personal learning networks are composed of many people from around the world who bring there own information, expertise, and learning objects that are interests of yours. The best part about a personal learning network is that they are all about the individual. These networks come in handy for anyone in any field because it allows the user to find new information and ideas and bring apply them for use in their life and at work. Creating a personal learning network does not happen overnight it takes time, effort, and perseverance. Social media is a good place to grow this personal learning network and there are sites that help you vet potential people to follow in order to ensure that you are following the right people who will aid in the personal learning network. By having a large personal learning network it allows someone to reach out to get information about topics so they can apply the results to their life. For example, they used an example of a high school teacher who "...learned he would be teaching a section of algebra in 2010-2011, he turned to his personal learning network as he planned his lessons and assignments" (Nussbaum-Beach and Hall 95). This is one of the most useful benefits of the personal learning network because it allows for an easy way to reach out to people to gain aid for you to apply to your field of work.

This personal learning network that Nussbaum-Beach and Hall describe would benefit me in my future career as a manager because it would allow for easy communication with anyone in different departments within the company or someone who is stationed in a branch in a foreign country. It allows for the sharing of ideas to be done with ease and research that they have for a project that they could be working on could apply to a project we are working on. Sharing this kind of information allows us to apply those findings into our project or vis versa our research or project could help them. The personal learning network would not only benefit me because it would allow me to aid others by helping provide valuable information that they would need. For me, personal learning networks are beneficial just for the communication aspect because in this day and age the ability to easily communicate with others is crucial in the workplace in order to accomplish what needs to be done. This is especially true for managers since they need to effectively let their staff know what tasks need to be completed and when and if they need help they would have access to this personal learning network allowing them to receive aid if they need it.

"Building Your Connected Learning Community." The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, Solution Tree Press, 2012, pp. 91-108.

The Connected Educator Chapter 2 Summary

Chapter 2 of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall's The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age discusses the importance of developing these online communities, whether they be for learning, professional, or even personal use. These communities that they present us with depict the necessary tools and benefits of using these communities. One of the main benefits of these communities in communication. They allow us to connect with people all over the world which in turn allows for better networking as well as the ability to help one another. These communities all for people to post information for others to use. For example, they use an example of how a first-grade teacher " ...uses technology to help her students connect, collaborate, and learn with people from around the world". (Nussbaum-Beach and Hall 32). In order to sell yourself to people when applying for jobs, you have to network and the personal learning network allows for that because it is intended to stimulate personal growth. By following the model that Nussbaum-Beach and Hall provide us with these learning communities would make networking easier since you would be able to connect with anyone at any time and market yourself to them.

These networks that Nussbaum-Beach and Hall describe would benefit me in my future career as a manager because it would allow me to network and connect with people all over the world. As a manager, I would be overseeing my own team as we work on the projects assigned to us. The networks would allow me to have members on my team who are either across the country or across the world since we would have the ability to contact each other at any time. We would be able to share knowledge and ideas to accomplish the task at hand. Additionally, if there is another team in a satellite office who has research that we are applying to the project or is aiding on it we could reach out to them to and gain that knowledge, unlike if these networks did not exist. Even the personal network would benefit me because it would help me network with people whether they are in my field or not, I can establish these connections with them which could be useful in the future. Networking with people outside your company could allow for job offerings or networking inside your company could lead to special projects which would, in turn,
further your career in the company.

“Developing a Connected Learning Model.” The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter. Hall, Solution Tree Press, 2012, pp. 25–44.

Introduction Video