 Hi, my name is Paige Hale, and I'm so excited to be part of the K-12 online conference. My presentation under the leadership strand is titled, Leading by Example, Using the Internet to Promote Lifelong Learning and Professional Growth. So many things I want to share, and I'm mostly sharing this to give you some insight, some things from my own experience. I currently work as a school psychologist in a K-12 district serving students, you'll hear me do that a lot, serving students pre-K all the way up to seniors in high school. And this is my seventh year as a school psychologist. A couple of years ago, I lost my job due to budget cutbacks, which are not unusual in K-12, and I just wanted to give myself more opportunities and to make myself a better professional, more well-rounded, all of that. So I decided to go back to school while I'm still working on all full-time and pursue a doctorate in education in the area of educational technology, and I do that through Morehead State University, but there are quite a few fully online courses from very well-known regional universities. So you don't necessarily have to go the, you know, for-profit online route. Because Morehead State University is considered a very good regional school, I work in the state of Kentucky. So that just kind of gives you an idea. Couple of things I want to talk about is social media, communities of practice, some of the things I've learned as I've applied myself on social media with the idea of using educational technology. So personal websites and blogs, and I have started a personal website, it is definitely under construction, but I will share that with you all. I don't consider myself incredibly techy. I'm a wannabe techie, if that makes sense. Also listservs are another important thing that have really helped me immensely. That's how I learned about the K-12 online conference, and here I am. Free webinars, MOOCs, which I'll talk about that as well, and open courseware. And also communities of professional practice. So are you a member of, you know, a professional association? Are you involved? Maybe you should consider getting involved, because prior to joining this program, that was not something that I had really done. I was a member of some of these things, but I had never really done it. So I hope you enjoy. Hi, yes. So now I want to talk to you guys about social media, communities of practice. A couple of the things I've learned, and I will talk about the professional associations I'm a part of. One of them is called AECT, which is the Association of Educational Communication and Technology. There's also ISTI, if you haven't heard of ISTI, it's the International Society of Technology and Education. But anyway, these organizations have multiple, multiple Facebook pages. For each of their divisions, as a school psychologist, I'm also a member of the American Psychological Association. There are tons of divisions of the APA, so I'm a member of the ones that fit with my professional interests. One of the cool things is you get on these, you know, all you have to do is like the page and you will learn about online presentation opportunities, publishing opportunities, free webinars, which I will also speak of. But I mean, it is just a trove of videos and professional resources and best of all networking. I've met so many people on the special educational technology and instructional design Facebook pages. People that I email with, all of that. Another thing is Google Plus, okay? Google Plus is fairly new and if you've not used it, it is awesome. You need to have a Google account, so like a Gmail account, and you don't even really have to use it for email just as your login, and you get on Google Plus and they have almost like a Skype feature, if you are familiar with Skype, that they call Google Plus. And Google Plus, with my online program, we actually hold some of our classes on there and up to 10 people can get on at the same time. You can see everyone at once, everybody can talk and have interactions back and forth. And what's so amazing is I have social hangouts outside of class with individuals from my cohort, and I am closer to individuals. I can honestly say this, in my doctoral program, completely online than I was in my full-time traditional on-campus Masters in EDS program. So that says a lot for the power of Google Plus and Google Hangouts. Another thing about Google, and there are tons of webinars and tons of resources to tell you about Google Tools, but some of my favorites is Google Scholar. Google Scholar is great because it seems like once you get out of college, you just don't have access to all these journals and all these scholarly articles. So Google Scholar lets you get those for free without having to buy the journals, that sort of thing. So if you're going to work on papers, thinking about publishing, you can find your great resources there. Another one is Google Drive. You've got to see this to understand it, but it is so cool. It essentially gives you access to like a blank Microsoft Word page, and you can invite others to collaborate with you on it. You get onto this form and you work together to create a paper, a group through my program. We had a 25-page paper to write, and there you go. We all worked on it together, we lived in different states, and it was awesome. Another one is Google Forms. If you're familiar with SurveyMonkey and programs like that, you can do the exact same thing through Google Forms for free. Last time I checked SurveyMonkey, you could only use maybe 10 questions. It was very limited for their free service. Google Forms is free, and was so cool. I have a survey out right now collecting data for a study I'm going to be working on, and you can set it up to where someone gets the online link, opens it up, takes your survey in 2 or 3 minutes, clicks Submit, and their answers are automatically put into a spreadsheet. You don't have to do it. It's all done for you. So that's something that is just amazing, and I want you to be aware of. And we'll go on with some more. The next topic I want to introduce to you all, and many of you may already have them, are personal websites and blogs. I created a personal website a little over a year ago, and just let it sit. And just fairly recently, I've started really adding to it. After seeing some personal websites that professors and other professionals I really respect have. On mine, I've been slowly putting in information from my curriculum Vita, starting a blog, sharing my video presentations like this one, but the sky's the limit. It can have a personal side to it, and it just looks really great on a curriculum Vita, and shows that you're trying to work with this new technology. I used a server or a host known as Weebly, W-E-E-B-L-Y dot com. There are many, but that's just the one I chose. And it has some great editing features, some really cool templates, and it looks so professional. I'm really shocked that I created something like that. If you want to check it out, my personal site is www.ed-ed-tech-tsych-ps-y-c-h dot com. So edtech, educational technology, and psych for psychologists makes sense. As far as the blogs go, blogs are great. It's a good way to share the latest research, to just show a personal side to yourself. So I highly recommend it. Another thing I want to talk about are listservs. Listservs are, they've been around forever, but I never ever would have thought how useful they've been. When I was at the University of Kentucky working in graduate school the first time around, now I'm at Moore Head State University. I was automatically signed up for a bunch of listservs. And this was for the various psychology departments, the various education departments. And to this day I still received those postings in one of my email accounts. I never, you know, had to sign off or renew them. But anyway, I have learned about so many cool presentation opportunities, cool presentations on campus at UK, because I don't live that far away. I learned about the spring research conference that I was able to present a poster at, otherwise I wouldn't have known about it. You know, some of the big names in the field of school psychology, I mean, you know how there are celebrities in every field, were coming to UK and I was able to find out about that and go for free. So that's a big thing. I would say on most of the departments of education that you will be able to find where you can sign up for listservs on the Kentucky Department of Education. You can sign up for special interest listservs out the wazoo. So for example, I'm on one for the state's guidance counselors, the state's technology teachers, school psychologists, just everything you can imagine. I'm probably on like 40 of them. So I would encourage you to get on your local universities. I know Ohio State, you know, I've looked at some of the big universities just so I could let you guys know and search listservs and you'll find them. You'll find the latest news presenters who are coming to campus, webinars that are coming up. But I am, like I said, on the ones through the University of Kentucky, also the Kentucky Department of Education, and they've been awesome and I don't have to do anything. A lot of people in my cohort in Morehead State ask, where do you find all these opportunities? And I say it's the listservs many times. That's often the case. I kind of mentioned this, but free webinars are great as well. If you're a member of different professional organizations, I talked about a couple I'm a member of. They are always promoting free webinars for their members. I'm a member of the National Association of School Psychologists. Again, free webinars all the time. So that is a huge, huge benefit. So I want you to definitely consider that and maybe, you know, take one day a night or one day a night, one day a month and spend an hour or two and start working on some of these opportunities because, you know, you are going to reap benefits like you would not believe. So that's the next topic. Thank you. Hi guys. I have a couple more things I want to talk about. The next one is MOOCs. If you haven't heard of MOOCs, they stand for Massive Open Online Courses and just Open Course Wear in general. And I do want to read the definition from Wikipedia of what a MOOC is. Again, it's a massive open online course. And according to Wikipedia, a MOOC is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. Open access meaning free. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for students, professors, and teaching assistants. And, you know, MOOCs are really coming about and if you can get on the front end of them and really take advantage of them, you're going to be ahead of the curve, definitely. A website I would like you to look at for MOOCs, actually probably the best one is edx.org. So, edx.org. It is a conglomeration or a cooperative of major universities that have put all of these courses and a lot of them, most of them are the same courses they offer at their schools online for free. Now, you're not going to get course credit for them, but you're also not going to have to pay $50,000, $60,000 a year for tuition. You know, these MOOCs are so that you can learn so that you can improve your skills. As a psychologist, and I'm a school psychologist, my program is very focused in a certain direction. So I do intend to take some of these open online courses in very, you know, psychology areas I'm not as familiar with, like biopsychology and those sorts of things. There's one right now that I'm dying to take on autism and technology. And the good thing about edx.com, believe it or not, it is a conglomeration of schools that maybe you've heard of, MIT, Harvard, University of Texas, University of California, Berkeley. I mean, what could be better than that? So that's a huge thing. And the last thing I wanted to mention were the communities of professional practice. I already talked about communities of social media, but these are communities of professional practice. Again, there's organizations that you can belong to that are related to your discipline of education. Like I said, I'm a member of the National Association of School Psychologists. As you can imagine, that's a typical thing that school psychologists are involved in. I'm a member of the American Educational Research Association, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, on and on, quite a few. Now, the one drawback, I think, to joining these organizations is they can be pricey. You know, $100 here, $120 here per year adds up. They are tax deductible. You know, you're doing that to improve yourself for your job. But that does get expensive. So one other thing I would encourage you to look at are the state-level chapters of these organizations. And even within some larger states, you'll have sub-organizations. I'm in a Kentucky, Indiana sub-chapter, I guess, of one of the larger organizations. I'm also a member of the Kentucky Association of Psychology in the Schools. Again, that's the Kentucky chapter of the National Association of School Psychologists. It's much cheaper to join. You know, the people that I interact with and that I network with are people who work in the counties around me and in the state at large. And I've created an amazing network of school psychologists. There are many others. The Kentucky Society for Technology and Education, only $25 a year to join. They have, for members, and I'm just saying this so you can think about your own state. But they have, right now, calling for proposals for grants. And they're going to give $80,000 away worth of grants. I'm paying $25 a year to join this thing. I'm going to hopefully get it presented at their conference. They have two conferences a year. They have officers. They have scholarships. They have awards. So these are great things to think about as you look at building your curriculum Vita. And I will speak to that for a second. If you remember, you have a resume and a curriculum Vita is more of an academic resume. When I started working as a school psychologist in the public schools, my curriculum Vita began to look more like a traditional resume. But once I got back into higher ed and thought, oh man, I don't know exactly where this is going to take me. I may end up teaching at the post-secondary level. I don't know. I started thinking again about getting that curriculum Vita back in line. All these things I've talked about, finding opportunities to present through listservs, through social media, publishing, presenting. I could go on and on. We'll make your curriculum Vita look amazing. And that's just huge to show that you're active in the scholarly dialogue and in the professional communities at large. So in conclusion, if you guys have any questions, feel free to contact me. I have all of this information because it's a lot to take in on PowerPoint with references. I can give those to you and I should be submitting them as well. And feel free to check out my website, www.edtechpsych.com. Thank you so much. I hope you're enjoying the K-12 online conference as much as I am. Thank you. Bye-bye.