Effective Instruction

The first paper I read, A Model of Effective Instruction, focused on the four elements of QAIT: Quality, Appropriateness, Incentive, Time. The part of this that I personally struggle with is the Incentive component. It's important that students are motivated to do the work you are assigning. This ties back to what Alan November was talking about. He found a way to do that by getting the students involved in their communities and taking ownership of the problems they were working on. I would love to do that, but I'm not entirely sure how to.

The second paper I read, Principles of Effective Instruction, had two main principles that it focused on. The first was the idea of reflexive learning. That means that students need to reflect on what they are learning. I agree that this is incredibly important to student success in terms of complete understanding and retention of the material. My issue is that it feels like there's never enough time to allow for that to happen in class. We are being told we have to include more and more into the curriculum every year and I feel we don't get to go as deep into as topic as we should because there is never enough time in the school year. The other principle is support. There are three different types of support that were discussed: cognitive, motivational, and emotional.

I think it's important for a Technology Integration Specialist (TIS) to be an effective instuctor. The role of a TIS is to help classroom teachers become more effective instructors. Ultimately, students are more successful when their teachers are effective instructors. This means it starts at the top with the TIS and trickles down.

"This week we began studying presentation design. I had no idea..."

that C.R.A.P. (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) was one of the most useful acronymns in the design world. I realize that I do many of the things you really shouldn't do with presentations. My goal from this point on is to focus more on making the visual aids eye catching.

Week Three: Online Meetings

I watched a webinar called "The Mouse Pad Traveler" which was all about creating travel plans using the internet. It was hosted by a man name Tome Peters and he did a very basic overview of participating in a webinar before he began his actual webinar. I think online meeting and webinars can be very useful. Not everyone can just drop everything and travel anywhere in the world to attend a seminar. However, this becomes less of an excuse with webinars because you can go anywhere in the world to attend a seminar about anything without even leaving you home or office. I see a lot of potential for this technology over the next 10 years. I think about how much Skype has taken off in people's personal lives so it only makes sense to me that people in their professional lives attend more webinars.

10 things that make me go Hmmm... about technology in education

1. If the rest of the world new about SMART Notebook, then no would use PowerPoint ever again.

2. You Tube is not just for laughs, you can actually use it in your classroom.

3. Clickers are possible the greatest invention on the planet. Kids are excited to use them and they minimize grading by the teacher.

4. Scantrons are right up there with clickers. Best way to give a final exam if you don't want to spend hours grading right before the start of summer. Plus is gives you tons of useful data to compare with your colleagues.

5. Calculators are the worst thing to ever happen to students learning math.

6. If you have a problem with your technology, don't call the tech people, ask your high school students. It's crazy what they know.

7. SAVE! SAVE! SAVE! You computer will always crash at the worst possible time.

8. Will there ever be enough time for me to learn as much about technology as I want?

9. Compulsive email checking is not a sickness, it's just good practice.

10. If technology is supposed to make my life so much easier, why does it always make me so angry.

Week Two: Online Communities

I know a lot of people have decided to go with Facebook for their online community. My guess is that many of them were already members of Facebook so it makes sense. I am not a member of Facebook and I really have no interest in joining Facebook. I decided to join Classroom 2.0 and one of the reasons for doing so is that I really want to keep my personal life private and seperate from my work life. I like that Classroom 2.0 is geared towards colaborate technology in education, which is what I was looking for. I was not familiar with this particular online community before starting this project, but I hope to expand my professional learning community to include people from all over the world by joinging Classroom 2.0. I know that our school librarian is a member of Classroom 2.0 because I found her on there and sent a "friend" request. However, I think she is fairly new to the community so I'm not sure how she intends on using it. My guess is that she just wants to be able to collaborate with other librarians.

"Education has missed the boat, with respect to instructional design. Teachers come up with lesson plans on the fly, with little thought to why ..."

I don't think it's fair to group all teacher together in this statement. I think this quote perfectly describes some teachers in the profession. However, this quote is probably as far from the truth as possible for other teachers in the profession. I also think that this quote can apply to some teachers on some days, but not to those same teachers on other days. I have to admit that I am not always 100% as prepared as I would like to be in a given day. I try to the best of my ability to be prepared, but life happens and teachers are human beings. Sometimes you just have to go into survival mode and that may mean that you are forced to come up with lessons on the fly. I don't believe that is how most teacher want to teach.

When I first started this section on instructional design I thought it was going to make me feel like a really bad teacher because I do not currently follow one of the fancy little models. However, as I learned more about it, I started to realize that I do go through most of these steps as I plan my instruction I just do it without realizing it because I don't have a pretty check list of the steps that I can cross off. I think that now that I am more aware of the models that are available to me, I can spend some time finding the model that fits me personally. My hope is that by following a model and being more aware of the steps I can optimize my instruction to better meet the needs of my students.

I believe educational technology is...

more complicated than I ever realized. It is an area within the field of education that has seen more change than any other field. It was only recently that I discovered that what I thought was educational technology is really more accurately described as technology in education. Educational technology is not in itself about the technology used in classrooms, which is the misconception that I had. That is technology in education. Educational technology is more about trying to solve the problems that arise in human learning. It is a complex marriage of the people and resources that try to work to better student learning.