Digital technologies that play an every day role in my professional life are Google Documents, Team Drive, and Slides. These Google technologies are extremely effective for collaboration among colleagues with whom I work with every day. My favorite is Slides because of the capabilities it has to collaboratively plan lessons and units that can be delivered directly to learners. Slides are also very effective when using the co-teaching model of parallel teaching because the students are differentiated but receiving the same information. Most of the lessons I teach using Google slides to support the delivery of information in the lesson.
A technology that I have my 6 and 7 year-old learners use regularly is Book Creator. The technology is versatile, allowing the students to interact with the information in ways that exhibit their understanding. This technology is not limited to a specific subject therefore it can be used across subject areas for a variety of purposes.
A challenging aspect for an instructional designer is choosing the right software to design learning journeys with. The options are endless especially if you lack familiarity of different design software to begin with. It’s important to have an understanding of the software capabilities in order to choose the right software in achieving the instructional goals. Not knowing software makes creating a storyboard challenging for the designer because they don’t know how to properly design their prototype. Having a better knowledge of the software when creating a storyboard is also a helpful aspect, so you do it “correctly” the first time.
Challenges that I’ve faced are that learning new technology presents a steep learning curve that takes a lot of time to overcome. As a result, at times I have been somewhat reluctant to learn a new technology or take a long time before I finally invested my time. I now do a better job when choosing technologies where I feel the investment of my time will be worth it. I’ve notified that typically these tend to be technologies that are versatile versus ones that are more closed and limited for a specific use. I recently learned how to use Adobe Captive, which is versatile in how I can design learning for a variety of purposes. The hard part in learning this technology was how tedious it can be, as well as knowing how to achieve the actions you want to execute. The investment of time was worthwhile though because of the technology’s versatility and I see ways that I can apply it in my future both as a teacher and an instructional designer.
The latest website I have discovered that helps keep and me up to date manages some of my challenges with technology is, https://elearningindustry.com/. The resources on this site are useful to me as a teacher and an instructional designer.
Allison Brinkerhoff 