Instructional design

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Time for Reflection

Computer Educational games and simulations are a great way to present daily facts and skills that you want your students to master while practicing in a fun, repetitive, rewarding, and instantaneous environment.  In these environments, students tend not to fear failure and will try again in an attempt to win the game by getting better at the subject matter or specific skill.  And there are many computer based or web based games that one can play alone or with others around the world.

Two common examples are Words with Friends and Funbrain where students compete with each other to improve vocabulary, spelling, logic, math, history facts, and other skills.  You, yourself, have probably played a computer based educational game that requires a knowledge of some skill or set of facts to do well.  I am writing the obvious, though, to try and build to the next questions.  Do students learn more than the skill when playing the game?  Do they discuss unique ways of understanding the skills?  Are they just doing?  Do they spend time reflecting upon accomplishments?

At Absolutely Learning we are currently creating computer based games that will increase understanding of skills as stated above, but we also want to give students and people direct time for reflection.  Students can work upon stand alone projects for a certain amount of time, but students should also engage in the face to face time of reflection.  Students need to become great communicators, and they like to discuss how they accomplished a goal with the educational technology.  Yes, these games are designed for people to share results upon completion as well as provide competitive solutions.  Great communicators are needed, and perhaps this is one way that you can have students practice their speaking skills.  Perhaps a student could share an answer for the class too.  These games give your students time to reflect upon the game played, the round won, and the solution solved.

If you are interested in what I am writing then please continue following this blog or send me an email.   There are games in development for the iPhone and iPad that will give your students and friends an opportunity to reflect upon how they accomplished a goal as well as learning valuable skills.  These are both stand alone products and group games that were designed for these purposes.

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Student Centered Instructional Design

Are your students learning from each other?  Do you create projects that require students to produce learning, share it, compare it, and make it better?  Could you use technology to complete that task?  Are your projects game oriented, project based, scenario driven, or exploratory?  Are your lessons student centered and do they encourage students to attempt, possibly fail, evaluate, redesign, and redo?  Why not?

Teachers need to put the student in the center of the learning tasks and they need to remove the focus from the front of the classroom in order to reach the modern student and produce great learning.  The instructional design of a project utilizing share, compare, edit, and redesign phases will allow the teacher to have more time to help his students, evaluate their work, put the student in real learning scenarios, and employ current learning strategies and standards that challenge students to develop life long skills.  The students in these types of classes also develop real world skills, and students learn how to learn.  Many of our most successful entrepreneurs promote this type of learning, and they frequently state that this is what they seek in future employees.

Life long learning is our most important goal, but without experiences that get evaluated and reworked students are not developing life long learning skills.  Lab environments with clearly stated goals and objectives, technology tools, and time for editing do produce the best examples of what our students can do.  We need to give them more time to explore and worry less about discrete items in lists, dates, charts, and tables.  They need to learn to use the information that is easily accessible to them, and they need to produce it in creative, interesting, unique, and meaningful ways.  Good instructional design is still as important as ever.

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Learning Design Facilitator

I recently ran across an article from Alan November in what appears to be a recent article at the eSchool News web site, and it reminded me of his great discussions about educational technologies at conferences and through his publications.  In the article entitled “Don’t plan for technology, plan for learning”, he describes a moment with a client where he suggests that the name “Director of Educational Technology” be switched to “Learning Design Facilitator” and thus brings to mind the following points for schools to remember.

First and foremost is the point that we are designing and developing better learning moments through educational technology usage so that students are absolutely learning.  Learning must occur, and must be the highest and most important goal.  Learning must be evaluated properly, and the learning must maintain current high success levels or improvement.  Does your technology administrator understand learning in schools?

Secondly, I say that learning must maintain current high levels of success or better because we do have great teachers teaching and learning administrators must respect that and honor that.  Perhaps your school is simply making great learning more accessible, modern, and relevant to technologies.  Perhaps students are learning to use modern technologies to continue great projects from wonderful teachers, and thus this is an improvement at your school.  Does your technology administrator honor great teachers with a proven track record and help them adapt to those changes?

Thirdly, it is important to note that education must drive the technology and not technology drive the education.  Over my career, I have witnessed too many educational experiences where technology professionals and those in control of technology changes at schools don’t understand the educational side of the equation.  Much money is spent without truly achieving educational improvement and life long learning with these tools.  How is your educational technology being evaluated and do you have someone in place who can clearly evaluate the overall affect on learning at your institution?

Educational technologies founded in educational research, proven methods, and creative implementation are what schools need to achieve moments of absolutely learning.  While I am fine with the term Director of Educational Technology, I do believe all technology administrators in schools need to be constantly reminded of the educational principles that they are being empowered to improve.  Does your school truly merge technology with learning goals or are you simply filling spaces with cool technologies to appease the pop culture and your parents?

Educational Technology from Absolutely Learning – Matt Moore
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Instructional Design Siting

This current year I have been teaching Spanish to superior middle school students at Chatsworth Hills Academy and using the Spanish textbook series Avancemos published by Holt McDougal.  The series design begins with a stellar textbook that weaves cultural units by country with common grammatical standards.  Students experience each unit with highly contextualized, authentic, and relevant photographs, side stories, written dialogues, and activities with clear objectives that reinforce state standards, speaking and writing objectives of language educators, and learning improvement opportunities for students.

In addition to this extremely well designed and published textbook is a fantastic web site that reinforces grammar, vocabulary, and cultural objectives with interactive quizzes based upon video dialogues, grammatical reference, and other listening comprehension activities via the web.  Students can also explore web quests, animated grammar, verb conjugators, and more.  It is truly a language tutor with quick feedback for students who want answers immediately in this information rich era.  It also allows students to work out some language questions from home and build confidence for the speaking needs in the classroom.

With these facts in mind I am siting this textbook series as wonderful example of educators collaborating with educational technologists to create a product that is working for my students and I am sure many others.  It works as a classroom tool, an individual tutor, a project platform, and a blended environment.  There are so many resources (even audio visual materials and a workbook series that I left out) that this series deserves kudos.  It is a instructional design masterpiece worth research by future instructional designers and current graduate students in education, educational technology, or language learning.  Learn from what has been done well.  It save a lot of time.

Educational Technology from Absolutely Learning – Matt Moore
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My Students from Sierra Canyon School are motivating me to post.

I was recently questioned by a few Sierra Canyon School (Chatsworth, CA) students who had read my blog, and these wonderful students notified me that I was not posting as frequently as I should on my blog.  I was embarrassed that my blog had fewer posts than originally intended so I decided to get back to the basics and post about instructional design and the making of eLearning modules.
 
I have found instructional design vital to improvements in my teaching and training needs, and I have used instructional design techniques to help faculty and students improve teaching and learning. I find instructional design professionally rewarding because it involves producing, developing, and implementing innovative and effective online materials. I have created educational video, web sites, podcasts, flash animations, Garage Band projects, and other motivational learning modules that enhance student learning in online, hybrid, and web-enhanced environments.  I also collaborate frequently with teachers to ensure that learning goals are met through the creation of these digital learning materials, and I enjoy testing projects so that students and teachers are satisfied with the learning moment.
Well, I hope you enjoyed a post from me, an educator with over 20 years of experience in the classroom and using instructional design.  Thanks students for motivating me to achieve the high standards that I try to set for you.  
Educational Technology from Absolutely Learning – Matt Moore
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NECC 2006 : One Perspective

NECC came to San Diego this year, and because I am local I had the opportunity to visit this national conference for educational technology in school environments. I was only able to visit on Thursday July 6 because of other engagements (some of which were job interviews (YAHOO!)), but I do have some general comments about the trends in educational technology that are being discussed at the national level. As usual, I will focus upon the aspects that I believe are positive for our profession.

First, it was refreshing to hear educators talk about integrating technology into the curriculum in ways that create individual learning moments and provide motivation for learning subject matter content and practicing higher level thinking skills. Project based learning that involves collaboration and constructivist work seems to work nicely for technology integration, and I saw projects that used video, photos, testimonials, authentic materials, good writing, and excellent presentation skills. Our students are very lucky to have this technology in our schools, and NECC is a great place for teachers and administrators to learn about implementing technology into their established curriculum.

In addition to good teaching with technology, I was impressed with the videoconferencing projects that I saw and the prices of the software and hardware to make that happen. There were many vendors represented, and that competition is allowing a teacher to do a lot with a few hundred dollars. There is also competition among video and audio editing software companies, and I believe that this competition will create the availability of software that allows creative teachers in a variety of subjects to create entertaining materials with educational objectives that can be shared just like lessons, tests, and quizzes are shared currently. With a clear plan educationally sound projects can be created with increasing motivation.

However, there were two particular vendors at NECC that I believe were the best part of the conference, and the price is right at their tables also. The first is our Library of Congress. Of course, we have heard it before that the materials there are an incredible resource for our students. They are the warehouse of national free realia that can be used in your classes, but every year their digital version of this realia gets better and better. It is truly worth every educator’s time to visit their site and think of ways to increase learning motivation and understanding through the use of their materials. I could see many ways to incorporate their materials into subjects other than history too, and if you need ideas please feel free to write me.

Finally, I am simply sold on the idea of refurbishing older computers and installing Linux (the open software of choice) onto these computers. I am sure that there are tons of companies that would love to find an educational institution to use their old equipment, and with the availability of this free software you can do wonders on a small budget. Of course, the linux machines will not do everything that you need. However, I do believe that you could save a lot of hardware and software costs by creating labs that run these machines for the most basic of tasks such as operating systems, connecting to the Internet for research, word processing, spreadsheet creation, and basic web creation. With the money you save you could buy a few really high end machines for the more advanced features of video editing, computer programming, etc.. Budgets are always a concern in education, and this is a great way to stretch a dollar. In fact, I would even suggest that our friends from developing countries follow this same model. There are tons of computers that can be reused for these purposes; and therefore, I hestitate to agree with the building of new laptops for the third world. Why not reuse what already exists in combination with open source software?

Educational Technology from Absolutely Learning – Matt Moore