Blog #7

Section 7 (8 in 3rd ed) New Directions in Instructional Design and Technology

This section of the textbook addresses new directions and emerging technologies for IDT. For your final post, reflect on how you might apply each of the following in your current or future position in the IDT field:

1. distributed or e-learning environments
2. reusable design or learning objects
3. rich media
4. emerging instructional technologies, such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, Web 2.0, virtual worlds, electronic games, etc.

E Learning is something that my students, teachers and I are all currently working on.  I have showed the teachers many different resources that allow the students to complete projects/assignments in their class using web technologies and a variety of multimedia resources.  One example of of using e learning would be when I had 5th grade students complete a glogster about a math concept that they had learned in their classrooms.  They were all able to complete these projects online using a variety of graphics, videos, clips, text and more.

When I discussed in earlier blogs the importance of having expert teachers and creating groups to come up with strategies and skills to help other teachers create lessons and ideas, this is where reusable design could come into play.  Over the years several teachers have taught a lesson in several different ways.  Reusable design is a way for those instructors to share with the other teachers the best ideas and have the staff reuse their ideas and resources.  Many of the grade levels have to teach the same type of objectives with some variations, this would give those teachers a chance to work together to create a type of template that each one of them could reuse, but with some variations of their own to fit their needs.

I have already been using rich media to help students create projects.  Last year I had 3rd grade students complete a book review on a favorite book that they read that year.  They were able to use animoto, which uses music, photos and text to create a 30 second video clip of their favorite book.  They then were able to show it to other classes so they could decide which book they wanted to read.

One of the emerging technologies that I would love to use are simulation software programs.  I want to be able to have students work in many different subject areas with tools,resources, and environments that they do not have consistent access to.  For example, many of our students at our campus are part of a low socioeconomic group.  therefore most of the time they do not have access to going to different areas of the world, learning about new cultures, seeing things that are not right outside their front door.  If we had simulations at our school we could have the children complete activities with tools resources they have never seen or might never see otherwise.