Staying Where I'm At

After looking at all of the areas in which instructional technology is prevalent (military, healthcare, higher education, etc.), I see myself staying where I am, in the P-12 education environment, specifically, at the elementary level.

I currently am the technology facilitator at a P-5 school and really do see it as the place where I intend to stay with my degree.  Elementary school has always been the area to quickly recognize the changes of society and adapt to them.  Maybe it's because we get them first, and don't get much of a buffer zone.  However, because of this, we constantly are asking ourselves what is needed to stay relevant to our students.  I feel this is especially evident when it comes to technology and it's use in education.  The trends and technologies we begin to use and follow in early education move with our students as they proceed through the system.

The district I work in now, recently has made technology a priority.  However, even with its importance in the district, I see that the elementary schools are the ones that seem to be a little bit ahead of the middle and high schools.  Even the role of the technology facilitator (TF) is very different among elementary, middle, and high schools.  The way things are now, our elementary TFs are the ones that seem to be most immersed in the instructional design process with a lot of focus on curriculum and incorporating technology.  With the size of our middle schools and high schools, the TFs at that level tend to spend the majority if their time troubleshooting technology issues and training staff (although some are doing an awesome job to change this).  While we do these things also at the elementary level, we also have a lot of opportunity to design lessons for teachers, model lessons, and interact with students, and this is the part of the job that I enjoy most.

In a perfect world, one where education has lots of money and all of the resources that are needed, TFs would spend their time working with students and teachers and guiding them in the instructional design process.  We would have several technology specialists at each school, some focusing on design and media, others focusing on media repair, some focusing on staff development, and still others to take on the many other facets of instructional technology.  Since this is not the case, I like working at the elementary level, because it allows me to focus more on the aspects of instructional technology that appeal to me.

I do not have a lot of questions about the current environment I work in (I'm so new to the job, I'm still don't even know enough to even know what exactly I don't know).   However, I do question the future of my job in schools.  As I stated above, ideally, there really needs to be multiple people that focus on instructional technology at each school.  With the increase of the need for "21st Century Skills" and the gap continuing to widen between students and staff in perception of technology, I don't see schools as being able to keep up with instructional technology if things stay the way are.  With the limited amount of resources, personnel, and funding given to the area at the present time, I don't feel it can keep up with the changes. I am very interested to see what instructional technology will like like on our schools in the very near future, and am excited to be a part of it.

Instructional Media and Me

The instructional media that I am most interested in currently is the interactive white board (we use both ActivBoards and SMART at our school).  Four years ago I had the opportunity to be the first teacher at our school with an Activboard and I have been all for them ever since. Now as the technology facilitator, a big portion of my job at the time is focused on training teachers to use this media and helping them create lessons and units that are complimented by their boards.  What I love most about Activ/SMART Boards is that it is simply a way to control computer software and navigate through the world wide web in a large scale setting.  Web 2.0 tools is the other media I am currently obsessed with, and I love how the SMART Board can be used to instruct learnings on how to use various web 2.0 tools as well as present their final products to an audience.

Our school currently has about 16 classrooms equipped with boards.  The biggest obstacle I am currently facing is training teachers to use the boards as tool to help facilitate learning, instead of as an electronic whiteboard to help with lectures.  My lead teacher and I have been conducting staff development where we are incorporating interactive white board training into the content.  For example, two weeks ago we worked with each grade level in 3 hour workshops focused on science.  Four of my six  5th grade teachers are equipped with ActivBoards.  They currently do an amazing job facilitating  inquiry based science instruction.  With such a firm foundation in the instructional methods, we were able to spend our three hours looking at the inquiry based teaching approach and seeing how we could incorporate their Activboards effectively into their instruction.  The teachers began to create multimedia powerpoint presentations, put videos together, and create an electronic Science Notebook, that could help them model correct notebooking procedures.  It was pretty amazing to for me to see the teachers gather and create so much media that could be delivered via their boards.  I guided the process, but they really understood their teaching objectives and did an amazing job of using the media to enhance their teaching.  They really were true users of instructional technology.

In the future, eventually all of our classrooms will be equipped with boards and I see it becoming more difficult to make sure that the technology is used with best teaching practices.  A lot of teachers continue to do things the way they have always done them, so it will take some work to guide them to look at the ADDIE process and the most effective teaching practices.  Even more difficult, will be working with the teachers who want nothing to do with interactive white boards (I have converted one, but I have about 5 to go!).  It is becoming an expected way of delivering instruction at our school, so I hope to bring them along and get them to understand and take advantage of the ease of the media, instead of them being forced to use media they don't want to.  However, I believe that is our duty to teach students with 21st century technology and meet them at their level.  I hope to spread that passion and belief to our teachers so that they embrace the interactive white boards and the methods of teaching that should be used with it.

ADDIE is for Me.

When I look at the ISD model, it just seems to make sense.  When I look at all of my undergrad in education and the readings we have been doing in class I can't help but be overwhelmed with evidence of ISD model.

With five main parts to the ADDIE model, implementation makes up only one part.  I find is key that only one-fifth of the ISD model is actual content delivery.  The majority of time is spent on analyzing, creating, designing, assessing, and evaluating what will be or has been taught, and this makes sense especially in my own classroom.  As a teacher, I have seen the units, where I implemented each piece of the ADDIE model, meet objectives without problem.  I have also seen lessons fail that were mostly implementation and weak in the rest of the rest of the areas of the model.  When I follow ADDIE, I see better results from my teaching.

For the last three years I have been working on and evolving a poetry unit I do with my students.  I have spent months on my own and with with colleagues planning, developing and tweaking this unit.  And each year I continue to improve on it.  Last year I analyzed their final test results and saw that there were some weaknesses in the unit and students did not have enough opportunity to practice identifying some of the elements of poetry.  I went back to those sections and taught them in a different way, created a new assessment and saw huge improvement.  Not only did my students meet the objective I planned, but I still have parents from last year that approach me and thank me for getting their students to love poetry (a desired byproduct).  I strongly rely on academic research to shape my instruction, but it is my own personal success with using the ADDIE model that confirms its validity in my mind. I cannot deny what I have seen with my own students.  

I'll Learn You!

As I think about how people learn, I can't settle on just one or two theories. As I have gone through the readings and thought back to the theories of learning I learned about in college,  I realize that as individuals, we all learn differently.

When it comes to teaching, I am a firm believer that you cannot just settle on one approach to instruction.  With the multiple learning theories out there, there have been thousand of hours of research that have gone into testing these theories.  The fact that many are all still around shows that their are people that respond favorably to each of them.  However, it is my personal experience as an educator that confirms this.  As I went through each theory, I could think back to a numerous students that I saw learn best from each specific theory (or several).  I know that as a teacher, in order to reach as many of my students as I can, I need to design my instruction around the practices from a variety of theories.

When I would teach students with lower ability levels, I saw them find success when I taught with strategies based in Behaviorism.  They needed the constant affirmation and the whole process broken into small attainable tasks.  I think of the used of Study Island in my classroom where students were rewarded with a short game after each correct answer and how many found success in that.  In reference to Cognitivism, I have seen almost all of my students benefit from Dual Coding and Information Processing Theory.  I have also see students have difficulty retaining information when the amount is too great or it is always presented in just one type of media.  I am a huge supporter of Constructivism.  I would teach inquiry-based science, allowing students to come up with questions and create their own experiments to solve them.  I also am really big on letting my students know why they need to learn something.  When instruction is presented in a a real-world context, they can see why.  My knowledge of the Zone of Proximal Development was also utilized as I clustered students together for group work, and I always did my best to allow my lessons to be presented in a variety of ways. 

While I see the benefits of all of the learning theories and I do try my best to take advantage of as many as I can, I find myself leaning mostly towards Constructivism, Social Cognition, and Multiple Intelligences Theory.  I would always allow my students to collaborate in groups, create lessons with real world application, and present information using a variety of media to meet a large number of the intelligences.

Education Curriculum Specialist

While searching on Monster.com, the position of Education Curriculum Specialist caught my eye. This job is for a person to help create classroom, after-school, lab, and web based curriculum for The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. While the majority of the job revolves around the creation and design of curriculum, there are also opportunities to observe and deliver educational content. Requirements for the job include a BS in Education, experience creating lesson plans, experience working in science education, a talent for teaching, the ability to make complex science concepts accessible to k-12 students, high energy, and enthusiasm.

I feel that a job along these lines is exactly the kind of thing I can see myself doing in the future. I have a deep respect for science and actually considered pursuing my Master's in Science Education before I decided on Instructional Technology. In a technology based science museum, I could follow both of those passions as well as be given the opportunity to create and design curriculum. The one downside to the job is that the teaching is limited and I would love to work with k-12 students on a fairly regular basis. While this job caters two of my interests, I feel that the lack of teaching might be enough to pass on the position.

http://jobview.monster.com/GetJob.aspx?JobID=75502828&JobTitle=Education+Curriculum+Specialist&occ=3.11748&occ=3.11784&occ=3.11971&q=educational+technology&brd=1&cy=US&pg=4&vw=b&AVSDM=2008-09-05+20%3a09%3a00&seq=4

What Is Instructional Technology?

Instructional Technology is the use of any current technologies to either teach others or enhance instruction.  When I think of technology used for instruction, the use of computers is what first comes to mind.  Over the years, we have seen computers become more than just a tool for word processing, but with the introduction of the internet, and educationally focused software, computers are now being used to not only enhance instruction, but even deliver it. 

The internet provides educators with a great wealth of resources to enhance his/her instruction.   Websites, such as studyisland.com, readwritethink.org, and United Streaming are used to help with test prep or as a resource for teachers.  With the rise of Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis, blogs, and social networking sites, technology is now allowing students and educators to not just view the web, but to interact with it.  We now have the power to and collaborate, communicate, even earn a Master's degree completely online.

Some technology is used primarily for instruction, such as interactive whiteboards in classrooms.  However, I am beginning to see teachers take the technology that students interact with daily and find a use for it in education.  IPods can be used on field trips to record interviews with classmates or as a way to view video podcasts from professionals or their peers.  I have even seen a teacher have his students text friends on their cellphones as a way to collect data for a math lesson.

As technology continues to advance and become more accessible, we have greater opportunities to find uses for it in education.