What have I discovered? There is a lot of great information out there, but a lot of it is geared towards the reader making a purchase. Can a reader get through the information without making a purchase. Yes, so far, this one has. Since I do not want to join a community right now, but I do want to keep gathering information on learning theories and the brain, I will keep my search going and adding RSS feeds to a feed reader.
I am also going to add a few more links here and the insights that I have gained from venturing to these latest sites on my journey and quest for more knowledge.
______________________________________________________
First I found my friend, Gary Page's blog, and it is focused on Career Technical Education and all the opportunities available by reviewing what certain school districts in California are able to accomplish. Gary sends me several emails during the week, and it gives me so many ideas of ways to reach students. You have to have the right school district to accomplish some of these things though.
With the state of school budgets, giving our students all the opportunities we want to give them to leave high school ready to compete in the job market outside of the fast food, or retailing industries is a challenge.
Our wood shop on our campus has been forced to close. This year they lost all of their power tools due to fears of injuries and what might result. Now students create with non electrical tools, and they still love it. The class has young men and women who really look forward to spending an hour a day doing something creative with their hands and still learning some basic math calculations.
Gary's blog gives me hope that perhaps our school can expand our technology classes by combining them with core content subjects that gives our students the opportunity to see the why of learning math or a science course as they apply it to something dealing with technology.
I am hoping that school districts and politicians who create funding and policies for student can wake up and smell the 21st century needs for education. Education needs to get out of the one room school house mentality of drill and kill, and more into some hands on relevant learning.
That is my band wagon, that so many of us are afraid to join. Back to Gary's blog. It is Ed Synergy and located at http://www.edsynergy.org
Why should you be aware of this blog? I am posting a listing of the categories that might help answer the question.
If you just looked at this one posting titled: New Integrated Course for the ICT Networking Pathway on Gary's blog you will see just one project that has recently gained approval for implementation in California schools. You can see that developing these courses is not an easy process when you read that there was a collaboration to develop the course between different people working in 3 different school districts. In order for the courses to be approved they have to have rigorous and relevant content.
- Archive
- Business and Industry
- Career Ready Certifications
- Community Engagement
- Curriculum and Standards
- Educator News
- Effective Practices
- Opinions and Hot Topics
- Outside the Classroom
- Post Secondary Pathways
- Professional Development
According to this quote from the EdSynergy blog, this is what the students gain from taking this course.
Students having the knowledge and skills to understand and operate networks are critical to California because our 21st century economy runs on digital networks. Organizations of all kinds depend on a workforce educated to design, build and operate these networks.I left a comment on this article since I know how much effort is involved in getting a course like this approved. It is cause for much celebration. I hope that many students will be able to benefit from this course.
____________________________________________________
Another site I found was through following links on another classmate's blog. I mentioned the site called Articulate in a post yesterday. Today I went back to the site to see what more was on there. This site is huge with information about elearning.
Most of us who are involved with ID, need to know about e learning. While I am still the ID Newbie, I am finding out more and more about what I need to know.
They have several blogs on their site that are authored by the registered users. There is a lot of information about putting together a course and story lines. There is also a lot of information about jobs that are available in this field.
This week at Walden we are studying learning theories. When I looked at this website with all the blogs and the overwhelming amount of information, I could see the importance of using the right tools for your audience. Seeing all this information has made me realize that to be professional as an Instructional Designer and to have success you have to do know who you are teaching. Do you have to know how each individual learns to be successful? That is the question.
People may debate whether we need to know how the brain functions to be successful educators, and theorists may battle each other, but the bottom line is that when you are teaching you want your audience to be engaged. This e learning community can help us to do that with tutorials, and blogs and a wealth of knowledge being shared on hoe to make your presentations better.
I am sure most of us at this stage in our education have had some pretty bad experiences with power point readers and instructors who could not engage the class in rousing instructions. How many times do we leave a presentation saying to ourselves or are fellow attendees, "I learned a lot from that presentation. I can't wait to be able to use this."? I know the times I have said that have been less often than I would like it to be.
Knowing how to engage a variety of learners is vital to success.
No comments:
Post a Comment