EDLD5368+Reflections

EDLD6368 Reflections:Instructional Design

The course on instructional design was helpful to me in seeing the mock-up of a site where online courses can be created. The knowledge that I gained in this course was on many levels. I learned to use the site itself to create classes, content for students in those classes, and assessments to evaluate their learning. Doing that in itself was a bit of a challenge in learning to navigate the site, but it was great experience to try my hand at doing it. This new information was good for me to be able to connect to prior learning for me. I had used online tutorials and assessments in my classroom before, but not with some of the web 2.0 tools that we were able to incorporate in our creation of a complete online course. We also talked about ways to incorporate assistive technology into these as well. Because of my personal experience with working with special education students, this was good for me to be able to see. Also in my own personal experience, I have taken online courses, but I have never been on the other side of them, creating the content myself. When I have gone through the online courses that I myself have taken, I have felt that the ones that did integrate web 2.0 tools were the ones from which I benefited the most. That was a good reminder for me in the creation of my own online course.

In my experience with the site designated for us to use to create our online courses was not always a user-friendly site, but the end product was well worth it to me. This process made me want to learn and know more about it and to incorporate more web 2.0 tools into my daily teaching. As I went through the process of creating my online course, I wanted to share the site and ideas with some of my colleagues. Some were very interested in knowing more about it, but many were uninterested or even actively resistant to something that was new and unknown. This was not a group project, but when I tried to share it with peers on my campus, I was perceived to be the one with the power since I was the one who knew about this new tool (even though my knowledge was at the most basic level). Not being in control themselves seem to be off-putting to some. The resistant feeling or tone from hesitant co-workers showed me that they were afraid to try something out of their comfort zone and some expressed the thought that something like this would be too time consuming. Doing this caused some questions to rise for me, such as what sites exist to make this a user-friendly process for all teachers? I would be willing to go through trial and error more than some, and I would like to be able to share a site with other teachers that would really help to walk them through something like this. I would also like to know more about helping other teachers to integrate more web 2.0 technologies in their classroom teaching. I am puzzled about how to keep up with all of the new web 2.0 tools that keep popping up. I know about so many of them and have been exposed to many more, but even that amount seems to be only scratching the surface of what is actually out there.