New Directions in Instructional Design and Technology

With technology, and specifically technology in education, changing and advancing at break neck speeds, it stands to reason that the profession we are all pursuing is in constant flux as well.  Many changes on the horizon promise us a career that will be anything but hum-drum.  I wonder if some of the qualifications for the educational technology positions we seek should be flexibility, easily adapts to change, and works well under tremendous pressure at tasks that can never truly be completed.  My guess is that these will all be in the unwritten part of our job descriptions.

 

 In my current position, I use technology in big ways with my students, so discussing integrating these four topics into my world is something I am passionate about.  I am blessed to work in a district that is very forward thinking about applying technology in many ways at every level in our schools.  We are challenged to find ways to integrate technology not just for the sake of using technology, but for the betterment of the education we offer our students!

 

I love the book's definition of Distributed Learning for several reasons.  The biggest reason is that effective teachers have taught in this manner for years in order to reach all of their students at the appropriate level of instruction.  The definition given states that Distributed Learning is any educational or training experience that uses a variety of means, including technology, to enable learning.  As technological advancements have been made, we have all gotten progressively better at creatively including technology pieces in our instruction to the point that we could probably safely say that we wouldn't be as effective in teaching without it anymore!  I know that is a true statement for me in my classroom.  Being able to offer students instructional content in an online method (flipping my classroom) has opened up the door to more face to face and hands on teaching time with my students.  Usually one or two days a week, I post a video lesson to our class Edmodo website and my students watch and take notes as their homework.  Then, the next day we can apply what they have watched with hands-on interactive activities rather than them listening to me talk at them during our 60-minute class.  I have found that my students are better prepared for class when I have front-loaded the video lesson with vocabulary or examples before we tackle it in the classroom making us all more effective learners.

 

Reusable design put simply is able to help us all work more efficiently.  We all talk about collaborating and not recreating the wheel every time we start a new unit, but are we really working to reuse the things that we have?  Do we already have lesson plans or instructional pieces in our repertoire that could be easily adapted to a new lesson rather than starting from scratch?  Are we finding tools that are effective for our students and then adapting them to our next unit so that the familiarity helps students draw on their schema rather than feeling like they are in a brand new world as each unit passes? 

I realize that variety is the spice of life, but there is something to be said for adding variety in ways that will still allow students to hold on to some continual thread throughout the curriculum.  For me, this piece in my classroom is the continual spiraling of lessons as I tie one unit with the last and help the students find the building blocks of math.  This may look like a familiar activity that we can add to as we transition out of one unit and into the next.  For example, we are just wrapping up a long fractions unit and moving into our probability and outcomes unit.  Students can feel like they are ready to tackle this new unit when we work through examples that they can relate to what we've just done with fractions rather than tossing all of that knowledge aside.

 

Incorporating rich media into my classroom has allowed me to differentiate my lessons for several learning styles and levels of learning.  Students have an opportunity to hear my lesson, apply the lesson to the activities and examples we are working on, but some need that added support that rich media pieces offer.  For example, when students have heard me teach a concept every way I can think of but still need something more, I can pull from an internet source to either show a video,  have them practice with an interactive website, play a game that reinforces the concept, or follow a webquest to work through several levels of the concept. 

 

My current favorite rich media is one I am using with my math intervention group.  The website is Think Through Math and it is an amazing adaptive site.  Students begin by taking an assessment based on the standards that I can select and the website then tailors a pathway for them to work through.  Students pass through certain sections without remediation if it's not necessary and spend more time practicing concepts that they didn't score well on in their initial assessment.  The website offers practice problems, explanations both verbal and visual, and video teaching if the student is still in need of more help to master the concept.

 

 Emerging technologies offer us all the excitement of a career that will always have something new to learn, something new to integrate, something new to figure out.  The fun part about that for teachers is how to master (or at the very least tinker with) the new technologies before our students!  It seems that there is always something else that we can play with and find a way to apply in our classroom. 

 

One of the new sites that I am working to integrate is Glogster.  My plan is to create a Glog (an interactive poster as I understand it) to allow students to self-direct their learning on our first unit after the winter break.  We will be working through a graphing unit, so my plan is to create a Glog that has video lessons, interactive website links, games for students to play, and assignments they will submit to me.  In this format, students will be able to make selections all having to do with our graphing unit, but about topics that are of interest to them.  In the Technology Meets Education blog, the author gives a great explanation of how to use Glogster effectively in the classroom.

 

The bottom line is that in the field of education, using technology is no longer an option for a teacher to ponder.  Students come to school having many experiences that we can tap into to further their education and technology allows us the most effective way to do that.  I have included a graphic that can help us all to see the difference in how children navigate the media world and compare that to our school days.  We've come a LONG way in a short amount of time