Week 5 - Photo Sharing and Istructional Design

Greg Mileski
Week 5 - Flickr and Chapter 2
Dr. Horvitz
Oct. 6, 2010

I can see photo sharing being incorporated in many educational activities. I see photo sharing being used in the following areas:
Social Studies- units on world cultures, different lands or even just exploring places you couldn't travel to due to time and money. (Virtual tours)
Language Arts- Using pictures for written prompts or to create stories.
Science-when talking about different land structures and tree identification.
Math- To talk about shapes, scale and measurements.
Technology- How to tag things and post things.

As for concerns about using photo sharing, I have concerns about students posting things that are inappropriate or giving out too much information. Here with students, it is important to talk about Internet safety and to teach them about the option to mark things for public view or private view. We don’t need students posting their names and tagging friends in pictures that can be viewed by the public. Unfortunately, we have some sick people in this world that prey on children because of information they post. Photo sharing if taught in school does provide an opportunity for educators to teach those Internet safety skills.

Benefits of Photo sharing sites are that they let you organize your picture, label them, and create albums that you can easily share with others. Some sites even provide you with options to create prints for reasonable prices. A few other benefits are that your pictures are stored out on a server so if you have a fire in your house you don’t lose your photos and you also can access your photos anywhere you have Internet access.

As I read chapter 2, I really liked how they outlined the elements/phases of instructional design called ADDIE. I also liked how they listed six characteristics of instructional design. Since I am a teacher, I could see some similarities between the process the authors described and processes I’ve used to develop lesson plans. The processes that are similar are that I try to identify the goals, make it learner centered, make authentic assessments (usually project based), and I also collect data as we go through lessons to check for understanding. Like they say in the reading it usually takes a team to make instructional design effective and efficient, this is probably why some lessons don’t measure up so well. When this happens, this allows for that revision process. This is also another reason it is good to collaborate with other teachers and colleagues. In my district we have professional development days in our schedule about every two months which gives us time to collaborate with other teachers. Since I teach technology, I meet with the other two tech teachers form the other two middle schools. This is a valuable time to discuss and revise lesson plans. I’m glad to see similarities between creating lesson plans and the instructional design process.

Differences I see are that instructional design usually takes a team of people with a wide range of skills and usually takes a longer time than me making a lesson plan. Lesson plans for me may take only a week or less to design, but they are modified constantly for the learners. The other difference is the time constraints of the education process. We don’t always have time to dwell on a topic for long periods of time because of the amount of material that needs to be covered. Unfortunately, we as teachers use practices that get the majority of students to learn the material and move on because of this. Those who don’t master it either fall behind or get remediation. Maybe we need to fix this! Where to start?