Life's Big Questions

After reading Holly MacDonald's article "The Learning Professional’s toolkit – what’s essential?" I felt all the more confident that I am learning a great deal of important information in Literacy and Technology that will benefit me for years to come. MacDonald provides her reader with an outline of resources which she believes are essential for the average person in the 21st century to become familiar with and understand. She states it is important that everyone know how to blog, Screencast (Jing), use a search engine (Google), use a web browser, use a video camera (Web Cam or Flip), collaborate through the web (Google Docs), and join an online community (WDYWYD). I agree with MacDonald that all of these resources are important and find it interesting that each of them have been key components of what I have learned so far in Lit and Tech.

I understood how to use some of these resources prior to taking this course (i.e. how to use web browsers, video cameras, a search engine). However, I was unfamiliar with some of these resources until the class began. I know understand how to blog (See! :)), Screencast, and collaborate with groups through the web. In fact, after learning about some of these tools, I sometimes wonder how I have gotten through so many college courses without them. Understanding how to use these resources has opened so many possibilities for the work I do in my future grad classes and teaching career! I think it is important that I help my students become familiar with all of these tools, as they will be expected to use them long before their graduate school years!