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Demonstrates critical, reflective, and metacognitive thinking.
Instructional Technology is an area that will always continue to grow and new opportunities will become available, so reflecting on the lessons and units that have been developed allows for the designer to revise the lessons. As a discussion facilitator in Advanced Psychology I discussed long-term memory. This article discussed encoding the long-term memory, retrieving the information, and autobiographical memory. Discussing this topic allowed to me reflect on the units I have created. For instance, if I had created a unit on butterflies after learning about long-term memory, I would focus the lesson. Less on how much time and how much information they can find and more on the repetition and discussions in the lessons on a daily basis. I am evaluating the units to make sure students are metacognitively and collaboratively implementing technology to build a stronger long-term memory.
Throughout my experience at Southern Illinois University, I have created technology intensified units, but also have reflected on those units. In It 481, specifically, we reflected on our unit we created and our classmates units. This reflection allowed me to see the different designs and units people have created. I had the opportunity to decide if my classmates were creating strong effective units. For instance, making sure the objectives of the lesson were matching the activities of the lesson. Another part of reflecting is Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy allows the students use use higher order thinking skills. As a teacher it is important to reach all levels of students in the class. So, we also were expected to include different levels of thinking. Some of my strengths were my creativeness and organization. One of the weaknesses I had was the amount of time needed to complete the assignments. I had a lot of material to cover in such a little amount of time. The reflections helped me to create a unit on Ellis Island that was strong, effective, and interesting to my students.
In addition, I have created blogs that I used as I was creating the different units and educational websites. The blog created in Web Design (IT486) was used to reflect on the websites I was creating . The reflection allowed me to determine what was working and not working with the websites, as well as reflections from articles that could influence the design of my website. Through the creation of the websites, I was mainly good at changing fonts and adding pictures, but since I was not familiar with FTP'ing and linking all the pages it seemed to be difficult at times.