Final Submission - Revised Technology Assessment

1. At the beginning of this course, you were asked to assess your present strengths and weaknesses in technology. Has your assessment changed? If so, how?

                       

From taking the course this semester I was able to added to technology strengths. This semester I learned a lot about instructional technologies for my future library.  One of the information technologies that I learned about this semester includes glogster. Glogster is an online application tool that allows the user to create an online poster.  I learned about the online application tool from an on line discussion group. After reading about the online application tool, I immediately decided to implement the online application tool within my ESL classroom. I have used Glogster in various ways in my ESL classroom. In my ESL level one class, I utilized glogster for my students to write about their first day in the USA experiences.  My students were amazed to see that I could incorporate many videos on a single glog to showcase book talks that were created with Photo Story 3.  This semester I learned about wikis. I implemented wikis in my writing curriculum in my ESL class.  I went to various workshops in order to improve ESL writing because one of the major concerns that was peer editing needed to be done more. So I utilized the idea of the wiki so that my students can peer edit their writing samples. Students could peer edit writing samples of students in other periods.  This semester I was able to add more items to my technology strengths column because before I was only able to use power point as a presentation application tool. I also learned about two other online application tools entitled Animoto and Google docs. 

Joseph Rodriguez

Blog 4: Web 2.0 and It's implications on librarians

Organizing books and materials have always been the responsibility of a librarian. However, with the advancements in technology the way librarians organize books and materials have dramatically changed. Information technology advancement has allowed media specialist to utilize organizational and classification online applications tools to organize and classify books. Also media specialists can now create, store, and share book lists online with others. The implications of this new information technology, such as Web 2.0, include modeling for others how to organize books. Websites such as delicious shows others how websites are tagged and bookmarked. This process in turn is similar to reading strategy entitled a think aloud. Where the user discusses the process by which they complete a task verbally as opposed in their minds. By reading the tags that are associated with the bookmarks other users get ideas on how to tag their own website bookmarks. Consequently, this adds to the concept the Internet is a learning experience where everyone learns from each other.  With this being said, the websites that I have bookmarked on my delicious account include folksonomies, mashups, and web2go.  I believe these tags are more helpful than traditional headings because it leads my to understand how each website is used in education.

Joseph Rodriguez