| | Goal 2Employs appropriate approaches for envisioning, designing, producing, and evaluating a variety of design projects
Describes the process you followed in a
variety of experiences or projects to Envision, Design, Produce, and
Evaluate. Envision:
To demonstrate how you envision, you need to specifically
describe instances from a variety of
projects in which you followed decision making processes that
envisioned (e.g. imagined, defined,
analyzed, researched) the
characteritics of the problem and its general solution. Design:
To demonstrate how you design, you need to specifically describe
instances from a variety of
projects in
which you followed design processes that described in detail the
features of your solution. Produce:
To demonstrate how you produce, you need to specifically describe
instances from a variety of
projects in which you
employed production processes and created products that allowed you to
carry
out design ideas. Evaluate:
To demonstrate how you evaluate, you need to specifically
describe instances from a variety of
projects in which
you evaluated the effectivness of your designs.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
IT 500
While
completing my course design project for IT 500, I learned the steps
that good design entails. It begins with realizing that there is
a need for a new or different instructional design. This
realization can come from any number of places.For
me, it came when I was forced to think about my curriculum when taking
IT 500. I realized that I want to have my students participate in
more higher order thinking activities. I teach high school
special education, so my students aren't often asked to work beyond the
"Knowledge" and "Comprehension" level of thinking. Pushing my
students into the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy would require
fragile tact. Doing too much too soon may hurt my student's
confidence and cause them to shut down or lose confidence in their
abilities. Additionally, if I don't have them use their higher
order think skills at all, then they are, in my opinion, not being
challenged to the proper extent.I
envisioned a class that required high school aged special education
students to use higher order thinking skills. At the moment that
I deceded that I wanted to attempt to climb that mountian, I realized
that I had no idea how I would go about it.The next step was to design
the instruction that I had envisioned. After some research, I
decided that I would use the transformational learning theory for my
design. This is a constructivist learning theory that
states that participants learn by interpreting and reinterpreting
their their experiences (citation). It is generally considered an
adult learning theory, but I believe that it meets the needs of my
students.In
my design, I wanted my students to express they way they feel about the
topic at hand. In my class, we use it in a unit on the book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
The topic that they will be reacting to is slavery. I
wanted to start by having students give me their thoughts and feelings
based on their current knowldge of slavery. As we read the book,
the students will reflect on the way that thatir thoughts and feelings
change as they read more of the book.The
students will be using generative strategies to do this.
Generative strategies require the student to connect newly
learned information to previously existing schema (citation).
They will do this by describing the changes (or lack thereof) to
their feelings and emotions. After
I decided what I wanted to do, I had to decide how I wanted to produce
it. I had initinally thought about creating a bulletin board in
class that would display the most recent reflections of the students.
I decided against that and thought about creating a website on my
own. After I did some research, I decided that the educational
website Emodo.com had all of the capabilities that I needed already in
place. I then set up a class page on that site.The
production was realitively simple thanks becuase I was using Emodo.
I created different threads that my students would write on as
they went. Becuase it the site is similiar in layout to Facebook,
something that my students are already familiar with, I thought that it
would be a good choice to use.Before
I implemented by design, I wanted to make sure that it worked
correctly. To do so, I decided to use a think aloud protocol.
I had one of my students complete a think alound while navigating
the Emodo page. Based on this practice, I decided that I needed
to be more thorough. As I stated previously, I figured that my
students would be able to navigate it fairly well because of the
similarity to Facebook. I soon came to realize that I should not
have assumed that my students would have been able to navigate it.
After learning this, I decided to go back and give more specific
directions on how to use the page. | |