EDTECH 503 - Summer 2012
Synthesis Reflection
July 27, 2012
The instructional design process is somewhat like a football coach drawing out a play on a chalkboard. The coach knows his players’ strengths as well as weaknesses so he plans the play according to that prior knowledge. He has attained that knowledge through practice, drills, and prior game performance. Then he chooses the rationale for the play, what down and yardage he needs or an educational goal. Finally, he chooses how each part of the play will develop drawing a diagram with X’s and O’s explaining each intricate part. If the play is successful he can celebrate, if not he can ask an expert football analysis broadcaster, his fellow coaches, or even the players themselves how the play can be improved. All of the steps a coach takes in drawing up that football play can be likened to an instructional designer creating a plan in which any instructor can follow to gain success for their learners or students.
Before I began working with instructional design I thought it was merely another term for a lesson plan. After part one of the project was complete I realized that ID is an elaborate plan set out for learning that is not just for students, but also for anyone that is in need of any type of knowledge. Now that I think about it I could design a plan to teach my father how to program his cell phone considering his prior knowledge, visual restrictions, type of phone, and objectives. I could also assess his knowledge after as well as ask him to evaluate my instruction to see if it would be helpful in teaching my mother the same skill. I thought of that analogy because one of my peers’ projects was to instruct a group of learners how to use an iPad to take and store pictures. In ID project one the part that gave me the most trouble was the flow chart diagram. It forced me to see each aspect of instruction broken down into steps. The diagram seemed tedious at the time but it truly showed how important it is to specify each aspect of learning in the design plan.
In part two of the project the design started to come together for me with much more ease. The ARC helped me justify each aspect of the plan while the Instructor Guide was more like lesson planning for me, matching the instruction to the standards and the learning goal. I found the evaluation part of the plan to be an eye opening experience. As a teacher your lessons are evaluated from time to time by administration. Plus you can usually tell if your students enjoy the lesson. Finally through formative and summative assessment you can see if your lesson was successful. However, I never saw the process of ID evaluation laid out formally and planned with such intricate details. The process gives me a whole new prospective on my own daily lesson planning and how it is currently viewed. By using the techniques I have acquired in planning my instruction I can now see how to solve authentic problems that arise in my design.
Instructional design will now play a major role in my future work with educational technology. The certificate program I am seeking is Integrated Technology. With this new prospective on design I can better plan on how to include technology in my and my fellow 4th grade teachers’ lessons. The new Common Core National Standards stress 21st Century skills and technology integration is needed to obtain those skills. According to Summerville (2008), “The marriage of technology and integration and the use of technology as a tool through instructional design offers the population of students we served numerous opportunities to engage in lesson-building activities” (p. 45).My challenge will be how to create learning opportunities that may occur anytime or anywhere using etools. I believe ID will better enable me to provide more authentic and realistic learning experiences using technology.
Work Cited
Summerville, J. (2008). Technology integration and instructional design. (5 ed., Vol. 52, pp. 45). DOI: Springerlink.com