Understanding the Online World

Note: I actually had written this post some time ago and kept scheduling it forward, and after attending Chris Bugaj and Beth Poss' timely and terrific presentation at ASHA, this definitely seemed a good time to publish it!

If you are here, you are already taking steps toward taking advantage of the Internet for your professional development and practice. Kudos. I know this world can be a bit confusing and jargon-y, and found Sue Waters' Glossary of the Online World to be an excellent explanation of some of the most common terms.

Putting some of these words in context for you as a SpeechTechie faithful reader:

• You can see my little avatar over there in the right sidebar, a photo of me, and a different avatar on my twitter page.
• This webpage is itself a blog, hosted on the Blogger platform. Comments (as Sue mentions) are extremely welcome (I live for them!), and you can see some of my pages in the top menu bar (e.g. What is SpeechTechie).
• Cloud computing (saving it to "the cloud" meaning out on the Internet) has been featured here when I have made a document available to you from Google Docs (the tracking sheet).
• I hope that SpeechTechie becomes just one stop for you in your Personal Learning Network (PLN), including other blogs, Facebook pages, or Twitter contacts. To learn more about PLNs, check out this post from The Innovative Educator blog, or my own on ASHAsphere.
• Using RSS is something I have encouraged before by subscribing to this blog using a service such as Google Reader, or using the email subscription. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and it allows you to save time and be aware of new posts without having to visit all your blogs.
• Social bookmarking is a great practice- and it's really how I find/organize most of my links on diigo and delicious (you can just pick one)!
• Social networking is what you do if you access this site through Facebook or Twitter.
• Web 2.0 sites (though this term is falling out of favor, and "social web" seems to be replacing it) are what you use anytime you save something to the web. Kerpoof is a good example.
• Wikis are a bit free-form for me, but I started out all these online endeavors by creating a wiki, and find some to be great references.
• Tags are used here on this blog (called "Labels" by Blogger, at the bottom of each post) to put posts into categories such as "cause-effect" or "curriculum connections." Clicking on labels lets you see ALL posts in that category.

I am sure new tech words will keep on comin'- it's hard to keep up!