EDMD+7010-+Instructional+and+Information+Technologies

Semester: Fall 2009
This course challenged me to operate in all five roles of the media specialist, but primarily as a program administrator.
 * Summary:** This class provides students with the necessary knowledge to evaluate and select instructional and administrative technologies as well as their various uses. Students in this course are given the knowledge to create sound policies and procedures regarding technology (e.g., Acceptable Use Policies).

Roles of the Library Media Specialist

 * Program Administrator:** In this role, I had to carefully think about the policies I was creating and evaluate their effectiveness in regards to legal issues and the layman’s ability to understand the legal jargon contained within. The evaluations we conducted of existing school AUP and technology plans really helped me understand what elements made a policy weak. In the future, I hope I can bring what I have learned in this class to help build policies that not only protect the institution, its employees, and its students, but … I also had to learn to work with a limited budget and follow the rules set forth by a grant.


 * Teacher:** As a teacher, I thought about what technologies would support not only the technology standards, but the core subjects and electives as well.


 * Leader:** As a leader, I had to think about the needs of the staff and advocate to my group members technologies that they needed.


 * Instructional Partner:** As an instructional partner, I was required to work with administrators and learned that I often had to provide detailed justifications as to why a technology was necessary.


 * Information Specialist:** In this role, I am expected to be a leader in hardware and software evaluation. For our final project I created a needs assessment for our fictional school to help direct my groups decisions regarding software and hardware selection.

Work Samples


The Technology Plan project demonstrates my ability to operate in the five roles of the library media specialist. When developing this plan, I had to collaborate with members of my group who have served as school administrators and teachers. We had to consider the ALCOS and ISTE standards for the middle grades when selecting hardware and software while also working with a strict budget. This meant that while as a teacher, instructional partner, and information specialist I found many technologies that would support instruction, as a program administrator, I had to limit my choices to the programs I felt would be most effective in order to not go over budget. I also found this task challenging because my group members and I did not always agree on items. In this situation I had to operate in the role of leader by listening to my group members ideas, being respectful, while at the same time advocating for the media center and subject areas that were not represented by the members in the group.

In the course of creating a technology plan, we also had to develop an AUP for our fictional school. We read several articles regarding the strengths and weaknesses of AUPs and then collected and evaluated existing AUPs. From this activity, we were challenged to build a policy that clearly targets ethics, safety, and consequences for violations without leaving the reader confused as to what they are agreeing to. We found this to be quite challenging because we wanted to recognize that a user can accidentally violate the policy. This meant that we did not develop a clear cut discipline policy and we had to correct this mistake after receiving feedback.