The Importance of Personal Websites

This past week in class we discussed tools to create our own personal website. We looked at sites like Weebly, Wix, and Google Sites to help us see how easy we can make a professional website for our career. These sites make it simple to make a professional website by adding pictures, social media links, and many other tools.

We also looked at some professionals and their websites; we went through and noted some of the good and bad qualities of each website to help us understand how to make the best website for ourselves. In our groups, we looked at a professional, and my group focused on Sir Ken Robinson. He had a great website, but it was sometimes easy to get lost with all the information he had on some pages. We made a list of the pros and cons of his website, found here.

We also looked at some ways to integrate websites with social media. We looked at IFTTT (if this then that), and one article talked about five recipes to share your Instagram photos like a boss. These recipes included: posting your picture to twitter but not as a link, saving your photos in Google Drive, sending your tagged photos to Tumblr, making a Facebook album from your pictures, and sending your pictures to people via Gmail. 

Another article that focused on IFTTT but integrated it with Evernote was Five IFTTT Recipes to Power Your Day. This article talked about different ways to add your every day activities into your notes, like: making a journal of your tweets and save them to Evernote, adding your Gmail purchases directly to Evernote, moving articles you've tagged for research into Evernote, sending a text to add notes to Evernote, and journal your Fitbit activities into Evernote.

Sticking with IFTTT, there are a few different recipes you can use if your a forgetful person. If you lose your phone often, but keep it off of silent mode, you can make a recipe to have IFTTT call your phone by sending an email with a certain hashtag, If you don't want to use your data and want to make sure you're on WiFi when you get home, you can set up a recipe to ensure you don't run out of data when you could have been using WiFi. A lot of people are saved by the fact that their bills can be paid automatically; however, not all bills can be paid automatically and with a simple recipe, you can remind yourself to pay all of your bills on time to avoid pointless penalties.

We finish this week talking about chapter four of "Untagling the Web." This chapter focused on social networking tools; it focused on tools such as TodaysMeet, Skype, Kidblog, Edmodo, and Twitter. The most fascinating tool, in my opinion, is Skype. In class, we've used Google Hangouts on multiple occasions to talk to different professionals. Skype allows you to talk to anyone around the world, and it can be an extremely helpful tool in the classroom. You can use Skype to collaborate with different classes about similar topics; classes can present their findings on a project to the others and collaborate to come to a consensus for the results. Overall, with social networking evolving, classes are going to be able to collaborate easier and easier from all over the world.