Professional Portfolios

Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Google sites are three great web 2.0 tools that can be utilized for staying organized and up to date with your professional and personal life. Each site is a little bit different from the next and I think it is worthwhile to participate in all three sites. Plaxo is a nice site for managing all of your contacts on the many social platforms in use today. I imported many of my contacts onto my Plaxo site and now I can easily view the information from contacts of many different applications all in one place. Unfortunately my smart phone broke so I did not get the chance to link my phone contact information to my Plaxo site. As soon as I get a new smart phone I will sync its information to my Plaxo site. LinkedIn is a professional networking site where people can create a profile which details professional experience and then get connected with colleagues and potential employers around the world. Like Plaxo, LinkedIn allows you to import contacts to get connected. Having a profile on LinkedIn is an effective way to sell your skills to an employer and to stay connected with friends and members in your professional field. I do not have much information on my profile as of now but I plan creating a page that showcases my skills and experience and I look forward to connecting with others who are interested in physical education. Creating a professional website using Google Sites is yet another way to present yourself to peers in your industry and to those seeking employees. I think the best aspect of the Google Sites is that the site is completely your own, which means that is is highly customizable. You can begin with helpful design templates, add pictures, and create an unlimited number of  categories to display your interests and skills. I think the best thing to do would be to have an account on all three of the web 2.0 sites discussed and then link each one together. Each site offers nice capabilities for staying in touch with contacts and presenting yourself to the world as a quality professional. Having a resume in your documents on your personal computer just isn't good enough anymore. Now it is time to have your information readily available to those who need to see it.

Library Thing

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/TAH_____

Library Thing is a nice site for organizing all of your favorite books online. Finding titles and putting together your catalog is very easy to do. There are a couple of features on the site that I particularly enjoy. First, I like how Library Thing makes suggestions for other possible books that you might like. I also think it is great that when you add a book you can see all of the other people who have also added that book and from there you can check out the libraries of others who have reading interests that are similar to yours. Overall it is a great site for managing and expanding your reading library. 

Image Generator

 

 Image Generating technology is a creative and useful way to take a picture and and spice it up. I decided to use the site: graphics.imagetemplate.net. Choosing a magazine cover for my picture was was fun and I found the site to be very easy to use. I can see image generating sites being useful to business professionals looking to create a new ad or even a person who wants to send a nice card to a friend.

Podcasts

I searched the Podcast.com site and found an interesting podcast which dealt with the use of active release therapy to treat various conditions. I have interest in active release therapy because I trained at a facility for athletes where A.R.T. was used frequently to maintain proper function of the muscles for maximum performance. I was hoping that the podcast I found would get into the use of A.R.T. on many areas of the body but for now it seems that there is only one podcast that deals specifically with A.R.T. and carpel tunnel syndrome. Hopefully in the future the podcast expands on the use of A.R.T.. Podcasts are a nice way to stay current on what is developing in the world of kinesiology. I particularly like the fact that a podcast can be downloaded onto an ipod and listened to at almost any time, making them very convenient.

YouTube

This is a video of an Olympic lifter with the nickname of "pocket Hercules".  In this video he successfully performs a clean and jerk of 412.5 pounds, an amazing weight for a man only weighing 140.8 pounds. I love to train using Olympic lifts and while it might not seem so, the lifts are extremely technical which makes this video even more amazing.
YouTube is a great site. I use it for learning and entertainment on a weekly basis. I think it could be used as a fun way for a class to complete a video assignment related to Kinesiology.

Technorati

Searching the Technorati site was a bit disappointing for me. The reason I say this is because when I searched for the term "kinesiology" using the different search options the site came back with ZERO hits. I was expecting to find a long list of blogs that were centered around kinesiology or at least a few that had tagged the term somewhere, but there were none. I guess it is time for kinesiology lovers around the world to get more involved in the blogging world so that Technorati finds us during its next web crawl.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is an interesting site for creating and managing bookmarks. Instead of saving bookmarks on your computers web browser you save the sites online, making them accessible from any computer. The ability to access your bookmarks from any computer is the best feature of Del.icio.us in my opinion. I have not yet run into the problem of having so many bookmarks that I cannot keep track of them but I have wanted to access some of my bookmarks away from home and it wasn't possible. I can see the the tagging feature of Del.icio.us being useful to a person that has a large amount of bookmarks, as it would help them find what they are looking for quickly. Also, tagging would be useful to a visitor on another persons site for the same reason. At this point I feel that I have my bookmarks under control and I have memorized the web addresses to my most frequented sites making it easy to access them away from home. However, I think that Del.icio.us would be a useful tool for professionals interested social bookmarking in order to share information quickly and easily.