Google Reader

Google Reader is an amazing tool to keep up to date on latest news. Not just for technology but any site that provides RSS subscriptions, such as the New York Times, Microsoft, BBC News, Weather feeds, among others. Google usually emphasis a lot on the “user-friendly” feature, that is one of their goals, to make it easy for the “standard-user” and I think they have done a pretty good job. Google technologies are very user-friendly and very reliable. That is why Google Reader is one of the most world wide used RSS aggregator out there. If you like blogs this tool definitely will make your life easier.

iGeneration Report

Just by reading the title “Teaching the iGeneration” I immediately knew what they were talking about. The famous “i” means the current generation of digital technologies popular with kids and young people ( the iPhone, iPad, iPod, iTunes and so on).

Now our “phones” or "cellular phones”, they are not just a regular phone, they are actually a mini-computer, where everything is possible, besides to use the phone to make calls, you can now, send SMS text messages, you can read your emails, browse the web, view files, pictures, listen to music, among other features.

I as IT manager need to keep up with all the latest technologies out there, and it amazing how technology grows exponentially. The main point here is not to teach with technology but to use technology to communicate or provide information in a more powerful and efficient way. Once we as instructors get more familiar with technology, we can use quality-time in the classrooms more productively.

The iGeneration is dipped in technology, let’s take the advantage of that hunger to explore technology and use it to bring student’s attention that we can get our students/end-users more involved in learning.

Take a look at the following video, it's call iPhone everything...

What does a Web 2.0 classroom look like? (week 1)

As a Computer Science major I have learned to appreciate technology and its usage, I worked 5 years as Technology supervisor for the College of Education, and I found out the importance of the usage of technology in a classroom, because it makes everyone’s life easier. Technology aids teachers and students in several ways, one of the is called Web 2.0, please see the following YouTube video to understand what Web 2.0 is.

Web 2.0 in a nutshell facilitates collaboration and information sharing through numerous web based resources, some of them but not limited as Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Podcasts, Google Docs, Social Networks such as Facebook or MySpace, and more.

Today, students at all levels must have a classroom “Web 2.0” enabled, with all the technology available to make information for the students more accessible and faster to reach. In the other hand, Web 2.0 also plays a very important role on the teacher side because with all these resources they have a new way to engage their students in a more meaningful way. As discussed in our class, people that were born after 1994 are called “digitally native” in the sense that they are more multimedia oriented, they are growing up with all these technology already available. So we as instructors (Digital Immigrants) we must be up to date with all of this technology. In order to inspire our student’s learning with we need to develop interactive and dynamic lesson plans.

What does it mean to create a technology-rich constructivist classroom?

Technology has a great potential for student learning. A top of the line technology classroom enhances student’s learning and we, as instructors have to encourage our students to focus on their field of study.

Unfortunately, as we were discussing in our last class, I saw a tremendous lack of technology support on school districts. Few have experiment with technology that has been out there for years. The outcome of having a high technology classroom is really helpful for our student’s success.

Let’s take a look at the following YouTube video where it shows us a project in Kansas of a Technology Rich classroom.

We can see how helpful is to integrate technology in a classroom environment. We have to go beyond just textbooks and make use of technology to help students to reach their goals and dreams as professionals.