1.  That people's social media accounts actually do contribute to someone's acceptance to a university or consideration in a job opening. Online posts do have a real-life impact. Posting inappropriate content on your Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat can ultimately lead to an issue in being hired in the future. Any forms of questionable involvement or cyberbullying can leave a negative impact on your personality and on your opportunities in future endeavors.

2. That you can positively brand yourself online to look good to future colleges and employers. By posting appropriate content, and some content that may be relevant to your working skills or your education you can make yourself look more appealing to future employers or to admissions boards. It is entirely possible to have a positive digital footprint that in fact helps you get farther in future goals and dreams.

3. That there are professional places on the internet such as Professional Learning Networks that one can share resources and connect and talk to other professionals, thus creating a positive digital imprint in terms of learning and becoming educated on the internet. Schools and businesses can set this up for themselves so that their colleagues can participate and share idea and grow as teachers and as educators. 

4.  Not to overshare on the internet. Creating a profile on a site that is absolutely you, without going into depth on politics, religion, or other controversial areas can be beneficial to your digital footprint. Having privacy settings set correctly will also help for future endeavors, as it will establish your identity online as more of a professional presence instead of a personal one. Similarly, following the Golden Rule online is important for preserving a positive identity on the internet.

5. Everything is permanent. Simply deleting something that you once shared will not get rid of it forever. Therefore, it is important to maintain a sense of professionality on the internet. One way or another, past posts will be able to be tied back to the person who posted them, and that may cause issues. 

In conclusion, the internet is very permanent and very unforgiving. Everything posted will stay there, even if it was deleted. This is why professionality is essential to maintain on the internet. This professionality can be achieved through privacy settings, being considerate online, and likely even setting up a Professional Learning Network online to grow a positive digital footprint. It can help teachers learn and teach each other while also maintaining a professional tone and providing a positive impact on one's digital identity.

1. Kindness

2. Creativity

3. Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence

4. Perspective

5. Curiosity

I actually quite agree that these are my top 5 character strengths. They describe me very well, and three of them are wisdom based strengths which is where I feel most developed in terms of personality. I find myself very good at explaining things in a different way and in helping someone by looking at the world differently which aligns with Perspective.  Furthermore, I enjoy many creative things and I like to find new ways of doing things that are productive and interesting which corresponds to Creativity. My top character strength, however, I do not agree with. Although everyone would love to be considered kind, I think that curiosity should have taken a higher place on the list and that kindness should have been moved down one or two slots. I am an incredibly curious person, I find many subjects fascinating and interesting. I personally went to college out of curiosity about its difference for high school and out of my curiosity of English and fascination in the language that made me want to continue my learning on the subject. My kindness should have been at number 3 I think, under curiosity and perspective. Because although I do like to help people and take care of people I do not think I do as many good favors out of the kindness of my heart as I likely should if kindness should be at the top. My career pathway is on track to becoming a high school teacher, and I think that these traits are a very good fit for that job. A teacher needs to be able to explain things well and have perspective on the different ways that someone can learn and in different ways that you can explain it. A teacher also needs to be kind and caring towards students who may be having difficulties, and they need to be curious enough in their subject to want to teach it for years on end, especially as a high school teacher specializing in Biology and English. I also evidently have an ability to appreciate beauty and excellence in English, math, and sciences which rings true to teachers as well. A teacher must be able to love what they're doing in order to do it well, and I can say that I absolutely do have a strong appreciation of English.

Even though there are countless incredible web 2.0 tools that can be used in the classroom, there are barriers, just like apps, that students may have to go through to use these tools. Of course, accessability can always be an issue, and although many children now have laptops, or computers at home, there may be a couple of students that do not. And it could be an issue to use the computers at school seeing as schools have set hours that they are open. Also, there can be issues with the ability to learn how to use these tools. It may take more time for a student to learn how to use a web 2.0 tool than time actually creating the presentation. Often times this can take away from learning, so teachers have to make sure that they are bringing in tools that are easy to learn, or that students have the required amount of time to truly get the hang of them, before actually assigning and expecting a project. 

No, actually. For the most part all of the apps that I want I have already downloaded. I would enjoy a free photoshop app for my laptop but of course, that does not exist! Maybe I could use an organizational app for my photo gallery. I take a lot of pictures, and recently I have been taking photos of my friends and family. This leads to about triple the amount of photos being uploaded and posted and deleted from my phone. Although my gallery allows for the photos to be sorted into albums, I wish it could go further and sort it into content, maybe dates, and even sorted by edited and unedited versions of photos. Just a thought for an app that could be very helpful to photographers.

I am definitely part of the mobile age! I grew up with cell phones and social media, I never had a phone that was attached to the wall. I also very vaguely remember having a VCR which was quickly replaced with a Blue Ray DVD system! Looking back on it, all I have ever really known has been technology. I have always learned how to use different programs, I was an avid student in my technology class in junior high and high school. I enjoyed learning about Photoshop, and about how to code and animate things. I think that it's very beneficial for the technology that we have to continue advancing. I mean we have made gigantic leaps in technology in the past two decades, and I only see that moving forward just as rapidly as before.

For my personal choice of a technology tool that I would incorporate into the classroom, I would ask for some presentations to be done in Prezi. In case you are not familiar with this site, it allows for a boring Powerpoint presentation to be done in a way that engages students much more. Prezi presentations move along through information, and students are able to use their creative side to make the information into a large picture, sort of like mind mapping but with more freedom to create. In the classroom, I would likely ask for one or two presentations to be done in Prezi, and of course students would also have a choice of using the usual Powerpoint, poster paper, or mind mapping formats. However, when I was in junior high and high school I personally loved to use Prezi. These presentations are done in a way that almost all students will be captivated by them, as it enhances the use of kinesthetics for learners who need to get hands on with projects. It allows them to create almost a flow that the presentation takes on. It is also incredibly useful to the visual learners, as it can allow for the information itself to be organized into a bigger picture. Some students may not remember the information that is copy and pasted onto a Powerpoint presentation, because many of the slides look almost identical. It is hard to differentiate between related information and non-related information. However, students using Prezi will be able to group information into different areas of the blank canvas, and present it in a way that allows people looking at the entire presentation to visually differentiate between different sections of information. However, Prezi may be distracting to a degree, as it allows students to get very creative with their projects. Some students may spend more time on colors and pictures that can be placed in the presentation than the information itself. This program also does not necessarily cater to auditory learners who may need a bit more time to process the presentation. As with all technology in the classroom, children can get distracted, but this presentation service stretches far beyond the limits in a Powerpoint and allows children to visualize the information much more, and enjoy the hands on organization aspect that comes along with it.

        Initially, my interest in teaching came from the purpose that is placed behind the profession. The idea that I will have the opportunity to shape young people's minds. It is repeated in movies, books, and in daily life that by being a teacher, there is the ability of influence over young people. I, personally, had an incredible English teacher in my high school years. She encouraged me to do better, to put more work into my essays, to challenge my own ideas. She marked me harder than the rest of the class, and that was for a reason. She wanted me to do my best, she saw a potential in my writing that I had failed to see. This influence that she had inspired my love of reading, of writing, and of the English language. Ultimately, because of her tough love, I ended up with the highest mark in English 30-1 in my entire graduating class. I even beat out the Valedictorian. That was my proudest moment in high school, even more so than graduating itself. It was all because my English teacher pushed me beyond my limits, challenging me to better myself. She is one of the most prominent reasons that I want to teach.

        Another strong reason that I wish to teach is the love that I have for the subjects themselves. Of course, my English teacher inspired my love of English. However, I found my passion for Biology on my own. I truly believe that these two subjects are so important in the futures of the next generations. English will catapult the youth into a new era of communication because the use of the English language is changing rapidly and constantly. With emoji's and slang, it is a fluid and changing subject. I am excited to be a part of the future of English and to pass it on. With Biology, however, I personally love the intricacy of it. I have always had a passion for knowing what is internal, for having a knowledge of what is truly inside the body. Every organ's functions, every disease that can occur as a result of the body refusing to perform the way it is supposed to. I have always loved it because it gives me an understanding of myself, where headaches come from and why they happen, what happens when you have a rush of adrenaline, how your heart pumps blood. I am excited to teach children who hopefully hold a similar love for these subjects, even if I only encounter two or three passionate kids in my teaching years.

The future of education needs to adapt to these changes. Teachers need to be able to use a smartboard, and they need to incorporate technology into their lessons to keep them up to date and modernized. They may do this by the allowance of devices in schools, like students using their phones to look up explanations of questions, or bringing their laptop into class to take notes in highschool and middle school. Technology can be implemented in ways that allow students to effectively finish their projects, such as creating online graphs or mind maps to explain a concept, or creating a presentation using prezi or powerpoint. These technological advances will greatly increase productivity and learning abilities for students, as well as provide teachers with increasing ways to teach providing they understand the technology. I predict that our world is on a fast track to a fully technological classroom in 25 years.

However progressive and revolutionary the use of technology in a classroom will be in 25 years, I believe that students will also face many problems. Cyberbullying has been rising along with the use of laptops and smartphones, as well as an increase of procrastination. It is difficult to focus on one topic when the entire internet is pulling a student to watch youtube videos or Netflix or instagram. These issues may have a strong impact on the ability of students to learn in 10 years. Although the internet is a great resource for many students, it is also a great distraction to many.

Politics is changing rapidly as well, and today’s youth are much more involved in the policies and bills that the government is implementing. Transgender youth may feel threatened, as their rights are not fully established in some countries, and the homosexual population was just recently acknowledged as legally able to marry. The youth in the future will still be dealing with these politics, and with their identity not being fully recognized as the norm. Things like gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and sexuality are a part of a human being’s identity, however many of these are very taboo to talk about. This means that the education system of the future will need to remove the stigma around these topics and work to an inclusive environment for every student that attends the school. 

Another issue that future schools will feel the pressure of is the home life of many youths. Substance abuse and teen pregnancy are common in today's youth, much more than in previous decades. This means that the future education system will need to be able to counsel and help youth who are struggling outside of school, and as a result, struggling inside the classroom. This may mean implementing more school counsellors into the schools, or making available peer help programs, or drug and sexual education awareness programs. These issues need to be talked about in the school environment in order to encourage youth to get any help that they may need to succeed. I believe that future schools will need to be much more aware of these problems, and more equipped to handle them. 

Personally, I believe the biggest change will be the evolving technology that will be brought into the school. There are always new programs and new ideas that are coming out to help teachers, and to help students learn. The biggest task will be the ability of teachers to stay updated with these changes and work to make them an asset to learning instead of a hinderance.