Week 4 Reflection

Social Bookmarking and Defining Instructional Technology

      When I briefly looked over the plan for this week and saw social bookmarking I was completely pessimistic. I had very little prior knowledge to go on besides what I knew of bookmarking on my personal computer, and I thought it was going to be a pointless tool. As I watched the videos and learned more I quickly became more optimistic about this tool. I played around with it for a long time, it was a little addicting for me. I kept thinking of websites to pin. I love Pinterest, so this has a similar feel in the sense that it is all in one place and easy to access. I think the biggest value I see in this tool is sharing this with my colleagues. There are so many wonderful websites out there and parents are always asking me for good websites to use. It's like my personal storehouse of websites, but the best part is that I can share them with other teachers and they can add  websites as well.

     I mention this a lot, but I teach virtually. This means that communication with my families and also my colleagues is very important. You have to remember that I can't just pop my head into the Kindergarten room next to me and talk to the teacher and we only get so many opportunities to be all together at one time to collaborate. So, I see where this can be very useful. I already started talking to one of the other Kindergarten teachers about using this.  I really focused on websites that I could use for my students and tie into our curriculum. 

     I could also use this to share with parents, but I could use it more effectively with colleagues. I can post some of these websites to my Wiki and add the most relevant ones to our curriculum and what we are learning and remove them as we go throughout the year. This way it won't feel overwhelming for parents. You can check out what I have been working on and pinning here: https://delicious.com/kiparsons

     For the Trends & Issues reading, I was pretty intrigued to see where the definitions of Instructional Technology started and how far it has come. I had never put much thought into the definition of it, or thought of it separate from just teaching. I thought of it more of an extension of what we already do as teachers. The early definition that talked about instructional technology as the production of "visual aids" aligns more with what I used to think it was. As I read through more of the definitions I gained a better understanding of what instructional technology is. It is so much more! It's the process and systematic design of instruction. This aligns more with what I do now as a virtual teacher. The way my lessons are created and technology that is involved in it is very different from my lesson planning and preparation when I worked in a brick and mortar school. I think that's why I was so intrigued with these definitions. Most of this information was pretty new to me just because I never really knew a lot about this career. Like I previously stated I thought of it more as just an extension of what most of us do as teachers. I can't say that I feel like something is missing, only because I have such an early understanding of what instructional technology is.