Technology Educator's Reflection

This post represents the fifth and final week 5 discussion item for EDLD 5368-Instructional Design.

• What benefits do you see in educators knowing how to design and implement online learning?

The benefits are boundless. Educators in standard classrooms wishing to enhance their lesson design can implement online learning in order to give students opportunities for exploration outside of standard class time. Additionally, educators can implement online learning in order to provide lesson recovery opportunities for students who might be absent from lessons.

Districts implementing online learning can provide credit recovery for whole classes that students have either missed or failed during the standard school year. Additionally, districts can implement online learning as part of their regular course offering in order to better prepare students to meet the online learning opportunities offered when they get to college. What’s more, teaching “across the curriculum” (Cook, 1995) through integrated online learning can help students truly undersand lessons and encourage students to apply what they learned in one subject to necessary problem solving in another.

• How will you professionally use your course that you designed?

The professional development course I designed is appropriate for both the classroom teacher and for the corporate trainer to understand more fully the learning styles of his students as well as to achieve the teaching style he hopes to adopt or modify. In my current position in public relations, the class I developed is less relevant than if I became a teacher of students wishing to enter the public relations field. Once my master’s degree is complete, I can then attain a teaching position. As a teacher, I can use the course I designed coupled with Dabbagh’s online theories database (2010) to help students learn techniques to help their students to achieve a higher level of understanding. I can also teach others how to integrate hands-on learning into lesson design.

• Will you integrate online learning in your role as a teacher/staff developer?

I think integrating online learning is paramount in any modern learning environment. Whether you use it during a standard class time, or you design the online learning for students to “catch up” or get ahead, students will begin to expect online learning opportunities.

What becomes more important in the days ahead is to design relevant and rigorous online learning that corresponds to the curriculum and not simply have online learning for the sake of having it. The online learning should alleviate frustrations, not create them, and should be technically useable in order for students to concentrate on the concepts to be learned instead of spending all their time on the technical side of operating the interface (Shank, 2009)

• What questions do you still have about online learning?

My questions are simple: What are the leading techniques for creating online learning for handicapped learners?; How can differentiated online instruction best be integrated with the standard differentiated curriculum?; and In what instances is online learning best suited compared to standard personally interactive class time?

• What will you do with this new learning?

Armed with this new learning I will not hesitate to create online learning opportunities for even the most outwardly simple tasks. Even in my position, I have people at each of our district schools who help me collect news items to publicize about the district. I can create online learning to help them understand timeliness, essential elements of a news story, how to capture and transmit engaging photographs, etc, or as Williams and McTighe state it, to have both knowledge and the ability to transfer it to practical applications. (Ch. 3, p. 41). By directing my helpers to these online courses and giving them the opportunity to excel at what I design, they may become more confident in the materials the submit to me for publication.

Cook, Cathy J. (1995) Critical Issue: Aligning and Articulating Standards Across the Mathematics Curriculum, North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, Retrieved April 24, 2010 from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/content/cntareas/math/ma400.htm.

Dabbagh. N. (2006). The instructional design knowledge base. Retrieved on March 18, 2010, from http://classweb.gmu.edu/ndabbagh/Resources/IDKB/models_theories.htm

Shank, Patti, Ph.D. (March 5, 2009) Usability Issues That Impact Online Learning. Faculty Focus. Retreived May 15, 2010 from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/usability-issues-that-impact-online-learning/

Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Alexandria, 2005.

Online Learning Now & Later

The following post was made as a discussion response for week four of EDLD 5368-Instructional Design.

How do you see online education being used in your classroom, campus and district?

In Irving ISD, I believe online education is currently being used primarily for credit recovery; and if it isn't currently being used in this fashion, it will be very soon. I watch teachers' Twitter feeds and one or more ITS is always talking about creating one type of class or another. IISD also uses online education in a distance-learning capacity. Students interact with a geographically separated teacher in some classes either for credit recovery or as part of that particular class lesson plan. Also, one of our middle schools recently began a partnership with a chain of schools in India where our students and theirs could network and share project ideas. Finally, a large number of staff and teachers in my district also participate in Academic Partnerships for their own learning, which as we know is all on-line.

What type of staff development do you think K-12 teachers need in order to begin to develop and implement online learning?

I think a primary topic for teachers would be to help them understand that online learning, and learning using online resources, can be just as beneficial - sometimes moreso - than in-person learning in a brick-and-mortar school (Cradler, 2002). Also, as Hargittai found, the Internet offers a vast amount of resources that are otherwise not available in any one geographical location, and the Internet also fosters and enhances various skills of its users. Communication skills and writing skills are enhanced, as are technology skills through the practical use in online learning.

What impact will this type of teaching and learning have on the business world?

The acceptance of online learning as a legitimate form of teaching in the classroom will have profound effects in the business world. Workers will arrive in their jobs expecting to have online professional development and skill development training available whenever it is needed. As was found by Skillsoft, "prospective employees want to be learning via the latest technology, they expect to be able to – indeed they will demand it." (Young, 2007) What Young also found is that many employees currently entering the workforce expected learning to be available wherever they were, and that 38.1% of employees anticipating that learning at their desk would be one of the main ways by which they would get the training they needed.

How Does Technology Influence Student Learning. Cradler, John, et. al. (May 2002) Learning & Leading with Technology, Volume 29, Issue 8. Retrieved May 5, 2010 from http://caret.iste.org/caretadmin/resources_documents/29_8.pdf. International Society for Technology in Education.

The Pros and Cons of Implementing the Internet in the Classroom. Hargittai, Eszter. (n.d.) Retrieved May 5, 2010, from http://www.princeton.edu/~eszter/edu/sides.html.

The Future of Learning. Young, Kevin. (2007) Skillsoft Benchmark Study. Retrieved May 5, 2010 from http://www.skillsoft.com/infocenter/whitepapers/documents/futureoflearning.pdf

Backwards Planning

The following post was made for the week 3 discussion for EDLD 5368-Instructional Design.

I began my career after college in the Army, and one of the major timesaving planning techniques we learned was backwards planning. Backwards planning is a six step process: Identify the Critical Event; Identify all Preliminary Actions; Arrange the Preliminary Actions in Chronological Order; Estimate the Time Needed for Each Action; Scheduled the Critical Event First, and then Schedule the Preliminary Actions; and Check for Feasiility. I try to use backwards planning in just about every major life event, so I found this concept incredibly easy to wrap my head around.

That being said, I've only ever had one school teacher utilize anything similar to this. I grew up in a small town and had my dad for junior high history. He used to teach his classes from the end of the book first, going backward to the first chapters. This with the thought that the most relevant history for the students happened yesterday. They just needed to know what happened to make yesterday why it was the way it was. Once that was covered, students would be more apt to want to learn more about successive times in history working backwards. I realize this wasn't single lesson design, but it was close.

As for me, I would most likely design lessons like everyone else would design a lesson...learn the standards, assess the weaknesses, write a plan to teach the standards and reinforce the weaknesses, assess, rinse, repeat, etc. As Wiggins and McTighe point out: "more pointedly, how will we ever meet content standards or arrive at hard-won student understandings unless we think through what those goals imply for the learner’s activities and achievements?" Now, see step two from the Army backwards planning process. These two methods are obviously related in that visualizing the activities is the key component of backwards planning.

Describe Backward Planning. (n.d.) General Dennis J. Reimer Training and Doctrine Digital Library. Retrieved April 29, 2010 from https://rdl.train.army.mil/soldierPortal/atia/adlsc/view/public/9092-1/accp/is8700/lsn1obj4.html

Wiggins, Grant. Understanding by Design (Expanded Second Edition). Alexandria, VA, USA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2005. p 14. Retrieved April 29 from http://site.ebrary.com/lib/lamar/Doc?id=10081770&ppg=26

Really Understanding

The following post was made as a discussion topic for the second week of EDLD 5368 - Instructional Design.

According to Wiggins and McTighe (2000), some teachers believe their students should "really understand," others want their students to "internalize knowledge" and yet others want their students to "grasp the core or essence." Do these mean the same thing? When a student really understands, what will he do that he will not do when he does not understand?

They are similar, but don't necessarily mean the same thing. "Really understand" as I see it, is the ability for a student to not only retain knowledge, but also apply that knowledge to other learning and problems, and be able to use that knowledge when improvising solutions to other problems, or as Williams and McTighe state it, to have both knowledge and the ability to transfer it to practical applications. (Ch. 3, p. 41). When a student merely internalizes knowledge or grasps concepts, he will be able to recite the knowledge on cue, but not be able to transfer it to other applications.

What is your definition of understanding and how do you assess understanding?

My definition of understanding would be similar to that of the authors, however as I have always considered myself a learning fundamentalist, I do like the concept of internalizing knowledge. I would state understanding as the process of internalizing knowledge in order to apply relevant learning to practical applications outside of a particular subject area.

In my opinion, assessment of true understanding comes only from teaching across the curriculum (Cook, 1995) and encouraging students to apply what they learned in one subject to necessary problem solving in another.

Cook, Cathy J. (1995) Critical Issue: Aligning and Articulating Standards Across the Mathematics Curriculum, North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, Retrieved April 24, 2010 from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/content/cntareas/math/ma400.htm.

Taking Inventory

The following post was made for the first week of EDLD 5368 - Instructional Design after having taken a Teaching Style Inventory and Learning Style Inventory. These inventories can be found online here and here. Feel free to take them and see where your tendencies are.


From the teaching style inventory, I realized my worst fear...that my teaching style very closely resembles the style that I was brought up in...rote memorization, regurgitation of facts as assessment, and individual students working on projects with a predetermined "correct" outcome. After reading through the instructional theories database (2010), my style would mostly lean toward the objectivism/behaviorism theory. Fortunately I'm not a classroom teacher, so I don't (yet) have to worry about boring children with this teaching style.

I've thought a bit about why this would be so, and I've always felt that if a person has a strong foundation in fundamentals, he will be successful and competitive against even the most creative opponent. While this may be true, there comes a point where focusing too much on the fundamentals takes all the "fun" out of learning. A teacher must be willing to move on and allow students use that fundamental knowledge at higher levels.

As Bransford, et al, found from Lehrer and Chazan, "in classrooms using a form of "cognitively guided" instruction in geometry, second-grade children’s skills for representing and visualizing three-dimensional forms exceeded those of comparison groups of undergraduate students at a leading university . Young children have also demonstrated powerful forms of early algebraic generalization (Lehrer and Chazan, 1998). " (2000)

And so the onus is now on teachers and administrators to find out the teaching styles of their instructors and ensure that they are not - like me - holding the children at the fundamental level and instead are asking the leading questions and assigning the open-ended projects that will allow children to expand upon learning to a higher level.

Dabbagh. N. (2006). The instructional design knowledge base. Retrieved on March 18, 2010, from http://classweb.gmu.edu/ndabbagh/Resources/IDKB/models_theories.htm

Bransford, J.,Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (Ed.). (2000). How people learn. pp. 129-154 (Chapter 6). Washington DC: National Academy Press. Retrieved on March 18, 2010, at http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9853&page=131#p2000495f9970131001