Week 3 R/D3

I have been using social bookmarking in my classroom for several months now. The way in which I use it mainly me sharing with my students to keep them focused. I think Postman would be proud because this is an example of a problem I had that I was able to solve with technology.

I teach within the ever-changing world of technology at a career and technical center. An activity I do with my students weekly is “Tech Current Events” where students find a story on the internet about some new technology and write about it. On Friday we get together in a group and each student shares what they have found. The discussions are great and we all learn much. The problem I had was that students were taking way too much time finding a tech current event and often had to do a rush job on the written work to get it done on time. The writing is one of the my main interests as I am trying to bring more English Language Arts content into my curriculum. The reason the students took so long was that they were either indecisive, wanting to find that perfect story, or they simply got side tracked the way we all do when we are on the internet. What I ended up doing to solve this problem is subscribing to a few good technology news RSS feeds. Now during the week when I see an interesting headline I post it to my Delicious site under an “IT” tag. When I give class to prepare for Tech Current Events, I instruct the students that they can use any story they want as long as it is on my Delicious site and no other student has already called it. It cut the prep time in half!

One other use for social bookmarking I can see is for documenting research. It would be very easy to check sources if students tagged all their sources on a bookmarking site and the teacher had all students in his social bookmarking network. Two clicks and a teacher could tell if the student really read the stuff he or she is reporting about.

I liked the way Chapter 1 in Trends & Issues started the discussion at square one and discussed in depth the concept of what we are studying: Instructional Design and Technology. I must say that my views have been shaped somewhat by Postman in that I read this chapter with his questions in mind (to paraphrase); “what problem is there that technology can fix?” Reisner and Dempsey seem to be pointing out that one problem that can be fixed is simply education can be better. At the heart of both of the definitions of Educational Technology that the authors site (one of which they wrote) is “improving learning and performance.” I can get behind this definition but I think perhaps there’s more. I certainly thought that Ed Tech would help me bring skills to the classroom that would enhance learning but I also thought, and still think, that this study will help me make more learning happen during the same amount of time. I’m not necessarily talking about teaching the same subject better, I’m talking about the possibility of teachers layering subjects on top of a class already taught. For example, could I design a way to teach my more tech savvy students programming when they get ahead in their networking studies? Could a Civics class teach criminal law to accelerated students at the same time? Can a US history class have an American Litrature layer that is formalized, well designed, facilitated by a highly qualified teacher and mapped to applicable state standards? The brightest students crave challenge. This part of Instructional Design and Technology is perhaps alluded to but missing in the authors’ definitions.