Learning Technologies: A Starter Kit

I have no idea what I’m doing.

I am a brand-new first-semester second-week-of-classes Ph.D student. By day, I am a high school English teacher in the Dallas Independent School District, but I also have an M.F.A. in Arts & Technology. I like creating multimedia experiments, but I also have a mortgage. And I’m a newish teacher–second year. When my students began the school year doing assignments on paper, I knew I could not do this job forever, so… Arts + Technology + Education = Learning Technologies. That’s the equation I’m hoping will shape my next chapter.

In K-12 education, the role of the instructional designer is to develop products that meet the needs of both students and teachers by bridging the gap between learning, theory, and practice (Weible et al., 2023). In my school system, the number of applications available to educators is overwhelming. I think the task of the instructional designer is to maximize the intuitive handling of an application’s interface, so that learning the site’s content can begin soon–if not immediately–after first engagement. In the frantic setting of a live schoolday, there is no time for learning curves on a tool whose purpose is efficiency and ease.

I think the instructional designer will plan, create, and adapt the structure of a given digital curriculum. I do not yet know if that is my goal, but I do know that whaatever comes next for me, I will need to have intelligent conversations on this topic.

In closing, I tried to follow the “How to Join WordPress” video, but the interface had changed so drastically since its publishing that I could not follow the maker’s sequence. I ended up with a ridiculous URL address. I thought I was entering hashtags. I was wrong.

Reference:

Weible, J., Briskin, J. & Gregg, A. (2023). Examining Instructional Design Across Corporate, Higher Education, and K-12 Industries. In E. Langran, P. Christensen & J. Sanson (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 802-805). New Orleans, LA, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).  https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/221929/.