Journal #1

     I must admit that I am both excited and nervous about my first Studio experience.  I know for certain that I am looking foward to learning about all the different design tools and taking my experiences and creations back to my classroom to share with my students.  The daunting part of this process is deciding which tool(s) to use for the semester project.  For help with this step, I will look to the second-timers for advice on what has worked for them.  After the first two classes, I have narrowed down my choices to using either Flash or Captivate.  I know that multiple tools are used in a single project so I look forward to working in some Web 2.0 tools as well.  

     For class this week, one article we read was A Software Design Manifesto by Mitchell Kapor.  I found his definition of design quite interesting.  Kapor states that, "it's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes."  When I first thought of instructional design, I imagined designing for both personal benefits as well as for instructional purposes that would benefit my students.  As we are beginning to learn and apply the ADDIE process, it is all starting to make sense. 
    
     At this point, I feel that I am already ahead of the game.  I have decided that my semester project will be something that I can use with my students in the classroom and something that they can access from home.  My goal is to design a site my students can visit to review their eight parts of speech.  Teaching language arts has been my passion for 6 years now and I look forward to producing something that is useful to my students and colleagues.  

     I also feel like I have a good start with my community service project.  Utilizing instructional technology in the classroom setting is a difficult task for some of my colleagues; however, they have a positive attitude when it comes to learning.  They have informed me that I will have NO trouble with achieving my 10 hours.  :-)  My next service project will be on Wednesday during a grade-level curriculum meeting when I show 6th grade language arts teachers how to plug in and use their Mimio board.  I'm looking forward to it!       

Holly

Kapor, M. (1996). A software design manifesto. In Winograd, T. (Ed.), Bringing Design to Software (pp. 1-9). New York: Addison-Wesley.