Social media and online platforms are emerging technological systems that rely on new information and technology to function and progress through challenges they may face. Although individuals unknowingly utilise content from these platforms every single day, it is far harder to introduce additional content or encourage engagement with others. Social media tools are important for us to be able to engage online (Ray et al., 2014); learn how to responsibly discover, assess, and publish information. With the right tools, individuals can use online platforms to engage in meaningful and productive discussions with people from all backgrounds and guarantee that our participation is secure, socially responsible, and appropriate in the space (Gleason & von Gillern, 2018).

Before undertaking this project, I had no prior experience with the five key components that formed my E-Portfolio. Padlet, Pinterest, Pocket, Google My Maps, and Screen-O-Matic were the project's five core pieces, all of which were social media platforms that I used to support my online participation as a digital citizen. All five tools gave me unique opportunities to participate in social media platforms I had not considered before, and they all encouraged and supported my online participation. Online platforms transform how we live in our daily lives, influencing how knowledge is created and represented for digital citizens, while also threatening traditional management structures (Carlile, 2011). Each platform had different user interfaces for finding, producing, publishing, and managing the content you added to them. Whilst some had easier user interfaces, overall, they were all simple to engage with. Padlet is the platform on which my E-Portfolio was built; it is a collaborative site where you can create individual or countless posts that hold all your content (Edwards, 2020).

It is a good base for everything, and it acts as a medium between other platforms, whether that be videos, blog posts, maps, photographs and/or audio (Edwards, 2020). To post on Padlet, simply click on your board; you can also drag and paste files directly to the board, or by clicking the + symbol in the lower right corner to add a post. Padlet can be used in a variety of ways, from discussions to a live question and answers (Edwards, 2020). You can also collaborate on boards, and once you publish it on Padlet, it will be ready to share. You could connect it to social media and tools like Google Classroom so that it can be integrated in other places, such as blogs or websites (Edwards, 2020). 

Pinterest is a visually and aesthetically pleasing social networking platform that allows users to discover and express new interests, passions, and ideas (Meng, 2019). You can pin images, videos, and gifs to your own or others' boards and see what other people have pinned. It was a convenient and exciting new platform to use; searching for themes and adding new pins to my board was a great, easy to use feature (Meng, 2019). Pinterest was highly user-friendly, and I thought setting up an account and a board to be very simple (Suleman, 2012). Searching for content, adding pins to my board, and organising my board into sections was extremely easy. All my pins were added in a neat and tidy way. One downside of Pinterest is that I found it difficult to arrange my board once I added new pins because the interface kept trying to predict where I would put the new pin and would scramble my existing pins; I disliked this feature.

Pocket, in my opinion, was far more difficult to use than Pinterest. Creating an account was simple but it was hard to understand how to add articles. I installed the app on my laptop and applied the chrome extension to reduce the time it took to add articles to my account, even though it is primarily designed to be a mobile app; I felt this was much smoother than uploading articles from my phone (Pot, 2019). The Pocket mobile app offers a lot more functionality, and while I found it challenging to add articles, it has a much cleaner design. I struggled to 'recommend' articles so that they would appear on my account, and it was difficult to share my account so that recommendations would be displayed. I think Pocket has the potential to be a much better app than it is at present, but for content organisation, I would choose Pinterest. Both platforms show that individuals can make a significant contribution to society in a variety of ways online (Dubow et al., 2022). Using the PeerScholar platform, I was able to receive feedback on my reflection piece by uploading it for anonymous feedback; This was not without a small bit of difficulty, as I had trouble uploading my full draft reflection. For that reason, some of my constructive criticism included the length of my piece, as well as a request for more references and paragraphs to create better structure. I was pleased that the peers who reviewed my work thought that there was ‘excellent punctuation, grammar, and spelling’, and that it reflects the knowledge I have learnt during this project well.

 

Carlile, L. (2011). Development online: making the most of social media. International Institute For Environment And Development. Retrieved 10 March 2022, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep01460.

Dubow, T., Devaux, A., & Manville, C. (2022). Civic Engagement: How Can Digital Technology Encourage Greater Engagement in Civil Society?. RAND Corporation. Retrieved 10 March 2022, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep17637.

Edwards, L. (2020). What is Padlet and How Does It Work for Teachers and Students?. Tech&LearningMagazine. Retrieved 10 March 2022, from https://www.techlearning.com/how-to/what-is-padlet-and-how-does-it-work-for-teachers-and-students.

Gleason, B., & von Gillern, S. (2018). Digital Citizenship with Social Media: Participatory Practices of Teaching and Learning in Secondary Education. Educational Technology & Society, 21(1), 200. Retrieved 10 March 2022, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/26273880.

Meng, A. (2019). What is Pinterest? How does Pinterest work? Getting Started. Infront Webworks. Retrieved 10 March 2022, from https://www.infront.com/blog/what-is-pinterest-and-how-does-it-work/.

Pot, J. (2019). How to Use Pocket. Zapier.com. Retrieved 10 March 2022, from https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-pocket/.

Ray, S., Kim, S., & Morris, J. (2014). The Central Role of Engagement in Online Communities. Information Systems Research, 25(3), 528-546. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2014.0525

Suleman, B. (2012). 6 Things Pinterest Can Teach You About Effective Web Design. The Daily Egg. Retrieved 10 March 2022, from https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/pinterest-web-design-trends/.