Week 5 Flickr (not for me) & Instructional Design/Lesson PLans

Flickr. I’m really not sure if I would use this site for educational purposes. Oh, I’m sure there are some very positive ways a teacher could use this site to enhance a lesson, but the possibilities of students getting to inappropriate content to too great, at least for the age group I teach.
One possible use for Flickr is to make the learning visual. A teacher could use this site to download photos of any subject that s/he is teaching at the time. For example, a history teacher could download jpegs of different presidents and give notes about those presidents in the comment boxes. The teacher could even categorize these presidents by party affiliation, era, wartime, the list goes on. Now the student gets a visual of the particular president, a category to place him in and notes under the picture. This would be a fun and interactive way of learning. Many teachers in different subject areas could do this. Nevertheless, this could also be done on some of the other sites we have been introduced to during this class.
On the down side, there are way too many opportunities for students to get into trouble. I was curious if Flickr had its own blocking system. It doesn’t. (Or if it does, I didn’t see it.) When I was on my own flicker site I clicked on the explore link, typed in the words naked people, and got several photos that would be inappropriate for a school setting. I teach kids between the ages of 12 and 14. A lot of them would also try this when I was not looking. (It is impossible to monitor the each computer in the lab and work with students at the same time. We don’t have the computer monitoring software set up on all of our computers.) I could not take the chance to use or even recommend this site to my students. I would more than likely end up in a lot of trouble with my principal and superintendent, not to mention the parents. The first chapter mentioned “Ethics” in Instructional Design and Technology. For my situation in my school, it would be unethical for me to introduce this site.
If there were a program that was very careful to monitor and filter out the content that was inappropriate for children under 18 or even 13 (my students’ age group), it might be a good learning tool. Until this happens, I think any benefits it may hold are far outweighed by the potential problems.

Chapter 2 of Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology outlines the lesson plan process very accurately. I use the Madeline Hunter lesson plan design. This design like Instructional design is “goal oriented”. “Establishing well-defined goals is central to the ID process.” Lesson plans must have well-defined goals and objectives as well or I would not know what to teach and the students would not know what they are to learn. Another similarity between ID and my lesson planning is standards of performance. The goal of all learning is for the student to be able to take the knowledge they have acquired and apply it to the “real world”. Just as ID “prepares learners to perform meaningful and complex behaviors including solve authentic problems.” I try to design lessons to help students learn the information and that use it in new, “authentic” ways. Of course, there are lessons of rote learning, but those are building blocks to the ultimate goal of having a learner able to use what hey have learned in new, out-of-school situations. Another way ID matches my lesson planning design is “assumes outcomes can be measurable in a reliable and valid way. I try to assess my students both formally and informally. Most of my assessments are “related to the issue of performance. Students must demonstrate to me that they are proficient in all steps of the writing process. The only way they can do this is to write and be assessed with an objective rubric. Objectivity is very important in keeping assessment fair and even. Every writing sample is graded the same way with the same assessment. This is a “valid measurement of performance”. I don’t, however, agree that multiple-choice tests are not valid. I believe they do show whether a child has read a book or not. It depends on the goal you set forth. If your goal is that a child read a specific number of pages a night, a multiple-choice test can answer that question.
There are some explanations in ID that I don’t think would work in my lesson plans. Reiser and Dempsey say that ID is learner centered. I agree. The whole point of teaching and creating lesson plans is to teach the learners. That being said, I don’t agree that “there may be no initial assumption that a live teacher is even needed for the learner to achieve the stated objectives”. I don’t believe this for a moment. In my lessons I always plan for teacher input, teacher modeling, teacher checking for understanding, and teacher led guided practice. These steps are very important. Most if not all of my junior high students need teacher interaction to accomplish the goals set forth. Even taking this online class would be difficult without an actual live instructor. I know I have had to ask the instructor questions or looked at the answers he has given to other members of our class. This is a very important part of the learning process. (I took another online class with no “live” instructor. It was a lot more difficult because I knew I was on my own. There are still parts of the assignments I’m not sure how to do.)
There are a few other characteristics I don’t necessarily agree with. Reiser and Dempsey say that “data collection is at the heart of the ID process. Yea, data collection is extremely important to show that the lesson plan is working and the students are learning, however, there is more to teaching that data collection. Teachers need to teach students how to learn. There is a human side to the educational process that children need. Data can be misinterpreted very easily. For example, the school where I teach, my students do very well on the MEAP test. The data shows that my school is at the bottom of the county for test scores. How is this possible? Well, the data does not state that a schools score is lowered when less than 95% of students take the test. Our school has an alternative/adult education program. These students are counted in out MEAP/MME scores. Most of them don’t show up for the test. Therefore, our scores look lower than they actually are. Data can be misinterpreted. It can’t be the end-all for measuring progress. Finally, ID is explained as a team effort. My lesson plans are based on a plan that was put together from a team. The state tells me which lessons I must teach in my subject area in my grade. I am the one, however, that plans the lessons, implements them, and assesses the students. Therefore, I would say that it is kind of a team effort, but not really.
Overall, I was impressed at how closely ID is to lesson planning. I really made me think about what goes into long-distance learning.