Well, I'm beginning to settle into my new roles after a pretty big shake-up in the past few months: I love my job as a Connections Academy teacher, we're nearly finished unpacking at the new house, the kids are settled into the middle school and daycare routines, and I'm really enjoying the grad program I'm taking through Walden University. Juggling all of my responsibilities continues to be difficult (and the importance of cooking healthy food for my family has really taken a backslide - to the apparent dismay of my waistline), but it gets a teeny bit easier each day.
Anyway, here I am beginning to look into the world of instructional design. Well, you say, what IS instructional design? In easy to understand terms, it's the concept of figuring out the best ways to teach so that your students (whoever they are) can learn most effectively. This week we looked at the importance of professional development for teachers, and one article I read suggested that we should be frequently reading blogs to get ideas, stretch our brains, and basically be a part of the ongoing conversation about teaching and learning. Great idea, right? I've been reading blogs for years. I've even tried writing them (not very successfully, I might add). But most of the blogs in my feed reader are about food or parenting. Why didn't I ever think to use it for more than recipe inspiration or entertainment? So I went on an instructional-design-blog-finding mission...here are three of the best I found today:
1. Well-Rounded Professional by Lilly Kreitinger.
This blog first caught my eye because of the author's tagline: "Adventures in learning, training and career transition." I liked the way she embraces change and learning as an adventure, so I began to read. I found that this blog includes posts on a variety of topics, including instructional design, the use of social media, ID in education, and elearning - all areas in which I'm interested. It's a bit more focused towards the business world than education, but I think the content can still be relevant to the virtual classroom in which I'm currently teaching. This blog is still very "young" - just started last month. But the posts so far make me think that this is one I'll be interested in following as it grows.
2. Experiencing E-Learning by Christy Tucker.
I got a little bit excited when I found Christy Tucker's blog. I had been clicking through the links listed in my course references and not really finding much that looked like it would be valuable to me, but then a Google search for "elearning & instructional design blogs" brought up this one. Perfect! The site that came up in the Google search results was a list of lots of other ID blogs - hooray! And as I looked further, I found more and more to cheer about. The author sums up her site by saying the blog is about "Building Engaging Learning Experiences thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhrough Instructional Design and E-Learning." She writes about http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifinstructional design, k-12 education, higher education, corporate training, and lifelong learning. She also has a weekly bookmarks post that I found extremely interesting - I like blogs that are good at linking to relevant information elsewhere on the web. The site even includes a series of posts that explains what an instructional designer does and how people get started in the field - I think this will be a valuable tool to help me explain to family and current colleagues about what kind of career I'm working towards.
3. Following a recommendation from Christy Tucker's blog, I found The Rapid eLearning Blog by Tom Kuhlmann, an eLearning professional who runs the community at Articulate.
Some of the content seemed a bit commercially motivated, but I really like the visual style of Kuhlmann's posts, and I found quite a bit of useful information in an easy-to-access format. In just a quick perusal of the site, I found a list of PowerPoint tips that will really be helpful as I'm getting accustomed to my virtual classroom, some suggestions for people getting started in the elearning world, and dozens of tips and tools that will be useful as I continue to learn more about the field of online education. The author actually is a bit critical of instructional designers, which I thought was surprising, but even more interesting was the discussion in the comments on that post. This is a great blog that's easy to read and contains some great tips and tricks.
So, that's a start, at least. I've added these and a few other blogs to my feed reader, and I'm committing to spending a few minutes each day reading through ID blogs and thinking about what I learn (in addition to those cooking and parenting blogs that I was already reading).
~Jen
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