This is a survey I made to find out how people get their information about Fresno Pacific Athletics.
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Here is an example of a resume that is more visual than a typical one you'd see. It's good to be able to see ways that a resume can be enhanced visually. The tool I decided to profile in this post is one of the most widely used statistical analysis resources on the web: Google Analytics. This resource allows companies and organizations to get detailed stats about their website traffic and where their traffic came from. It is very useful for tracking what type of visitors found your site and how they ended up there. It has the ability to track website visitors from all over: search engines, social media, direct visits, links from other sites, etc. It can also track things like web advertising and impressions so that brands can quantify what their marketing is accomplishing. It can also track how long visitors stayed on your website, what links they clicked on and from where in the world they accessed your page. The geographical breakdown can be very helpful for a company wanting to know more about where its footprint is and how to market to specific areas. It’s estimated that nearly 50% of the world’s top one million websites utilize Google Analytics.
Professional networking is very important in today’s world for a number of reasons. With a never-ending amount of information floating around on the internet, it’s good to be able to connect with real professionals in real time to hear about real experiences. Connecting with people that share your craft and passion allows you to bounce ideas off of each other, collaborate and grow together.
Personally, I utilize professional networking in a variety of ways. Every summer I attend a conference put on by CoSIDA, a professional development organization that specializes in working with my field of college athletics media relations. The conference typically draws around 2,000 professionals from schools of every size all over the country. It always has great programming with relevant professional development sessions, but the most useful part of the conference isn’t the actual programming, it’s getting to interact with other people from all over the country that have the same job as you. They face the same challenges and work toward the same goals. It’s refreshing to be able to spend a few days with people that speak your language and understand your world. Another way I accomplish professional growth through network is on Twitter. Every Sunday night there is a Twitter chat put on by other athletics administrators from all over the country. It is primarily staff members from small colleges, like Fresno Pacific where I work, and it can be found using the hashtag #scachat, which stands for “small college athletics” chat. I like to browse through people’s answers to questions they come up with and am always enlightened by seeing how other professionals are accomplishing their goals at their respective institutions. I also utilize the social network LinkedIn to obtain the same objectives and connect with others within my profession. My LinkedIn Profile Wikis are a great tool because of the busyness of our world today. I know at my job, it can be difficult sometimes to get everyone at a table together at once. So what we do is utilize things like Dropbox and Google Drive to share work and projects. What results is a more efficient way of getting things done.
In the educational realm this rings true as well. Anyone can add or edit content to the wiki, which can make it easier for the educator to get everyone on the same page. They’re able to track who what changes and when, another great tool for teachers to see what their students are up to. Educators from all over the world now use wikis to share their knowledge, work together and contribute to overall growth. Some examples include book reviews, conferences, professional development, and subject guide wikis. LinkedIn and Facebook are very different social media platforms. The most basic way to summarize is that Facebook is primarily used for social purposes while LinkedIn is for professional purposes. Facebook is best used to stay in touch with friends and post information, photos and videos about everyday life. LinkedIn is a networking site where professionals can connect and network. It’s important not to get the concepts of these two sites flip-flopped. For example, if you try to use LinkedIn the same way you use Facebook, you’re likely to come off unprofessional while giving people personal info that they’re not really interested in. Likewise if you tried to use Facebook as simply a networking site, people are going to be turned off by the fact that you only ever post about work related things. Both have their place and both have become very important to our society.
Apps have done quite a bit to change the way we go about everyday life. The saying “There’s an app for that” rings true in just about every area. Apps make everyday things quicker and more convenient. Personally I use apps daily on both my phone and my iPad. I use them for work, for fun and to stay in touch with people. On my mobile phone alone I have access to email, social media, sports, podcasts, music, maps, photos, videos, calendars and planners. I have all kinds of specialty apps that do things like find the nearest gas station (GasBuddy) or give you reviews on what restaurants are near your location (Yelp). I have a translator, voice recorder, calculator, compass, unit converter, QR code reader and even a flashlight. It truly is amazing the kind of things that we can do simply from a handheld device.
Below is an example of a podcast from Fresno Pacific Athletics. This is me interviewing head cross country coach Ray Winter following the 2014 Pacific West Conference Championship Meet this weekend.
https://soundcloud.com/jwood619/podcast-interview-with-fpu-cross-country-coach-ray-winter This list, compiled by Jane Hart using over a thousand learning professionals from 61 different countries, attempts to take a look at how the way we learn is changing from year to year. In a follow-up article, she goes into detail about how the internet has changed the way we learn over the last 25 years and how it has progressed from when it started.
The list itself is pretty comprehensive and includes tools with all kinds of different functionalities. The top five, as well as eight of the top 10, are all things I use fairly frequently in everyday life. I went through the list and found that I use 28 of the 100 things listed. While I figured that I would have used quite a few of them, I was surprised that 72 of the top 100 tools for learning are things I either don’t use or haven’t even heard of. I have used all of the top 10, however, and actively use eight of the top 10 and the entire top five. I thought it was interesting, though not surprising, to see Twitter at the top. Twitter has risen in prominence immensely since I first started using it, which was around 2009 or so. It’s become a tremendous learning tool because of the way it houses so much information in one place and has an effective search engine as well. Twitter gives people instant access to people that were previously unreachable to the general public. | AuthorJ. Wood ArchivesCategories |
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