Week 6 Reflection

This is my 13^th year in elementary education. I am currently teaching kindergarten for Garland ISD.  I have taught in both private and public school settings.  The majority of my experience is in kindergarten.  After graduating with my bachelor’s degree from A&M-Commerce I worked for a year and a half as a recruiter for the university. It was a great experience and I traveled all over Texas talking to high school and junior college students about the school I loved.  After a year and a half I decided I wanted to go into teaching so I began teaching 2^nd grade at a catholic school in Dallas and worked on receiving my teaching certification from A&M-Commerce. Ever since I learned how to read I have loved books. I was one of those kids that hid a flashlight in my room so I could read at night. I would check out books from the library, buy them from the school book fair or store and finish them in one day. To this day if I’m reading a good book I can’t stop. I’ll read late into the night.  While working on my certification I decided to take an LIS course just to see how it was. I loved it. I knew then I wanted to one day become a librarian.  It would be a dream to share my love of books with children. That was over 10 years ago. Then life happened, I was married and began having children.  My plans of becoming a librarian had to take a back seat.  During the past 10 years I never forgot my dream of becoming a librarian but didn’t think I could juggle working full-time and being a mom/wife full-time.  This past April after my birthday I decided it was time to make some changes in my life and start focusing on myself.  So this summer I started taking courses to earn my master’s degree in Library Science.  It will take me a few years but I know it will all be worth it when I welcome children into the library and let them experience all the wonderful stories waiting for them in the books. 

I am very happy to see that there are so many ETEC courses required to become a librarian. Just as classroom education has changed drastically over the years so have libraries. I still remember walking into the library at A&M-Commerce in the mid-1990’s and having to use the old card catalog system to find books and looking through the numerous Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to find magazine and journal articles.  Now everything you want to research is available at your fingertips on a computer.  Librarians not only help check out books they are there to help students and teachers research and learn how technology can assist them in their education.  At this point I think of myself as middle of the road computer literate.  I know more than the basics but not enough.   This course is the first time I created a blog and posted.  I love reading other people's blogs but didn't even know how to get started. I can now use my new knowledge about blogging to help co-workers and students create their own blogs.  It is my hope that the ETEC courses in this program will help me become proficient in the technology aspect of running a library.

Week 5 Reflection

Chapters in Section V identify trends and issues in IDT in various contexts: business & industry;

military; health care education; P-12 education; and post-secondary education. Select at least 3
of these 5 contexts and compare/contrast the IDT trends and issues. Then explain how they are
similar or different from the IDT trends and issues in the context in which you work.

The three areas I chose to discuss were: business & industry, military and health care education.  I had some difficulty deciding how to present my thoughts so I created a graphic organizer because these three fields are vastly different. This organizer helped me to arrange my thoughts on how they are similar and different instead of trying to type it out in paragraph form.

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

Trends & Issues

Business & Industry                                      Military                                   Health Care Education

Primary arena for ID                        Funding/Budget constraints                The medical field is the

                                                                                                                      leader in developing

Growth & expansion of                   Designers must develop                       ID methods

corporations beyond                        training for dissimilar audiences

country boundaries                                                                                       Knowledge advances

                                                         Training is integrated into the              rapidly change and

Time & money constraints               workplace/training represents             currency and integrity

                                                          larger day-to-day activities                 are concerns

Designers must develop

cross-cultural training                      Does not employ professional             Designers must focus

                                                          instructors like the private sector        on problem based

Designers may work solo,                so designers must create lessons          learning when creating

be part of a team, or be an                to “train the trainer.”                            trainings

external consultant

                                                                                                                       Educational methods

                                                                                                                       of multimedia and

                                                                                                                       simulation have                                                                                                                        increased

In relation to how these areas are similar to my work situation. I believe time and resource constraints are issues dealt with across the board.  Each sector must come up with ways to pay for training and someone to develop the training.  Another similarity is the cultural changes occurring around the world.  All areas must identify ways to reach dissimilar audiences. 

  

 

  

 

Week 4 Reflection

1. Chapter 14 discusses the concept and evolution of human performance improvement. Several sections of chapter 14 present a variety of non-instructional solutions to performance problems. Identify a performance problem in your area of work and identify non-instructional solutions that may help solve the problem. 

According to Internaltional Socieity for Performance Improvement, “Human Performance Improvement (HPI), uses a wide range of interventions that are drawn from many other disciplines, including total quality management, process improvement, behavioral psychology, instructional systems design, organizational development, and human resources management."

An issue I have run into this year is having students in my classroom that are from families that do not speak English as the primary language at home. While these students came to kindergarten this year knowing some basic English I have noticed they are having difficulties with ELA lessons. I am ESL certified so I am capable of helping these students in class but I find that when I am sending homework home the families may not know exactly what to do with it. I am fairly certain I am not the only teacher to have this problem on my campus so my solution would be for each grade level to host a family homework night where they can train ALL families (especially those which are culturally diverse) with explicit instructions on how to help their child at home. In kindergarten the focus could be on literacy activities. The homework we send could be changed to interactive homework so the family can be involved and to show the child that learning is fun and their family thinks it’s important.  

2. Chapter 15 presents performance support systems. Define performance support systems and explain how a performance support system might (or might not) help solve the problem you identified above.

Performance Support Systems (PPS) are tools/resources a user can utilize to solve a problem/issue when needed.  PPS could definitely be utilized to help solve the problem listed above.  Grade-level teachers would need to meet together to discuss the type of homework they intend to send home during the year and how they will train the parents. The teachers would need to create handouts with the directions for parents and even consider having the handouts translated into another language if needed.  It would also be beneficial to show parents how to access online technology available to them that their children use at school. Having typed up handouts with these instructions would also be useful.

3. Chapter 16 explains knowledge management: the way we manage information, share that information, and use it to solve organization problems. Organizations, such as schools, accumulate a great deal information/data, which must be organized in a way that we can make sense of it in order to use for making decisions. What knowledge would help solve the problem you identified above and how would that knowledge need to be collected and managed to help facilitate problem solving? 

The students I mentioned above are also non-ESL students. Meaning their parents did not indicate that another language other than English is the primary language at home. This is an entirely different problem as parents are not informed when they fill out registration papers that this information could be used to enroll students in ESL and inform them exactly what ESL is and that it is not a bilingual program and that their child would be enrolled in a general ed. classroom and pulled out for ESL instruction. Data that teachers would need to prepare for their parent homework training night would be how fluent in English all the parents in their classroom are and what language is spoken predominately at home. Since many non-English speaking parents are cautious about sharing this information it could be gathered anonymously either by questionnaire or through an online survey.  This information would be used solely for the purpose of preparing for the parent homework training night and shared just with the grade level teachers. 

4. Chapter 17 describes types of informal learning. What informal learning experiences have you participated in at your organization? Could those informal learning experiences be shared with others? Could the knowledge gained in those settings be codified and managed? And should it be managed or should the informal experiences be replicated or broadened for others?

Much of my knowledge about using instructional technology has been acquired through informal learning. I use the website Pinterest many times during the week. I check out what my friends and fellow educators are “pinning” to use in their classrooms. I seek out more information on my own, see how they implement it in their classrooms, and try to see if I can use it and how I can use it in my own classroom.  I do not have to sit in workshops or trainings on how to use technology can I learn about it on my own and it is driven by my interest.  Many times I take these new ideas and share them with my colleagues and/or friends.  Things I learn about on Pinterest can be codifed by creating new “pins” on my boards but it is my opinion that most informal learning cannot be codified or managed.  Your personal experiences are your own and it is difficult to “manage” experiences.