Incorporating Technology into Extension

I mentioned yesterday that I am taking a course on using technology in teaching and extension.  The course has been helpful in a number of ways. 

First, it's helped me to realize that some of the technology I use regularly in my personal life for entertainment can actually be helpful in my professional life as a horticulture agent.  By this I mean things like blogging and twitter.  As I said, I've used both of these, especially twitter, extensively outside of work, but have never really tried to use them for work.  I think part of that comes from not entirely understanding the professional applications of the technology and part of it comes from an uncertainty of how the clients I typically deal with would react.  As a horticulture agent, most of my clients are fifty or older and while most use computers for basic functions like email, it's hard to know how many pay attention to blogs and twitter.  When I initially started this blog 5 years ago, I quickly got discouraged because it didn't seem like anyone was reading it and therefore felt like a waste of time.  Now, however, more of my target clients are on Facebook and it seems to be a little easier to connect with them online, so I hope that this experiment will be successful.  We also have a lot of discussions in extension on how to engage young people and get them interested in things like gardening and farming and we need to realize that technology is one of our best tools to make this connection. 

I've also been exposed to some new technology that I believe will be helpful.  A few weeks ago we had a lesson on Prezi, a presentation software, which is a tool my wife, a teacher, has been encouraging me to try for a few years.  Extension agents always seem to rely on Powerpoint in their classes and while Powerpoint is certainly useful, I sometimes feel as if it is a bit too linear and perhaps the people I'm teaching get a bit bored with its predictability.  Prezi operates a little differently, has a different look then Powerpoint, and presentations in Prezi don't quite have the same linear, straight forward feel that Powerpoints often do.  Animoto, another application that my wife has reaved about, was the subject of our most recent lesson.  I had a little bit of experience with this but not much.  Like Prezi, I see it as a different way to present information rather then always relying on Powerpoint presentations, although Animoto seems better suited to short presentations (around 5-10 minutes, or less) whereas Prezi is appropriate for longer presentations. 

Finally, for our class project I've been exploring Scoop.it, which is an application that lets users search and select online articles, videos, and blogs and act as curators by hosting the most informative and relevant of those selections on a unique website which they can then share with their followers.  I've experimented quite a bit with this, creating sites on home vegetable gardening and strawberry production which I'll share once the project has been completed.