Instructional System Design

Reading about Instructional system designs made me think a lot about my early days in education when I began learning how to do basic lesson planning. As a teacher we are always having to go through different design activities related to lesson planning and course design. Instructional system design I see as being able to take on varying sizes of projects. Often in my educational training we go through procedures to design a unit or lesson using some different type of method usually which puts focus on some new skill we have acquired. I see this Instructional system design to be something that can be used for even non educational purposed items which might still have some educational value. Video Gaming is one of the worlds where I could see Instructional System design to be used. Playing a video game there is often objectives the creators of the game have set out to instill on the user playing the game. Often the game starts out by teaching the player how to use the functions of the game to play. Then a mini assessment of sorts will be given to see if that development was successful. The player must implement to new skills learned along the way. I am sure when developers of games design them they would create very similar charts shown here for the ADDIE model. Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and constant Evaluation...isn't this what we do as educators on a daily bases? Basically instructional system designs is just another way of systematically think about the things we all already do in the classroom. It provides a way to organize the ideas as teacher we already have in the back of our minds as important. Basically it is an organizational tool which can be used with even modifications in a variety of ways.

Connecting to the Classroom

There is always a question I keep in the back of my mind every time I learn something new related to technology or attend a conference. How can I use what I have learned to help connect my students to the world. One idea that I have been trying out on a recent project is setting my class site up with a digital bookmarking site. Now it may not seem like much but it allows my students to share site with each other when they work on a site. I have it set on private right now but I could open this up to whole Diigo community. When I introduced the students to the site the other day students were setting up their accounts and immediately they were talking with one another in the chat section of the page. Students want to be connected and they want to share ideas with one another but they don't always want to do this in the classroom. I am thinking about eventually opening this site up. I have also wanted to find more ways.