instructional design

MassCUE 2011: Presentation

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Meg Robbins and I are presenting an hour-long, hands-on workshop at MassCUE 2011, Wednesday, October 26.  entitled: Motivating students to become self-directed learners.  If you want to learn more about understanding “how-to” motivate your students in their journey to becoming self-directed learners, this is for you.

  • Learn what self-directed learning skills are.
  • Understand what is critical you teach and how.
  • Gain tips you can immediately implement into your classroom.

Come join us at the 2011 Technology Conference in the Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Massachusetts. This year’s theme: Today’s Global Learners = Tomorrow’s Global Leaders = TGL2: What Next?

MassCUE 2011 Motivating students to become self-directed learners

View more presentations from Mary Wiseman

New Digs: Before and After

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While Spring cleaning is usually left to the earlier months of the year, I decided to take on a clean-up project of my own and re-design my own website. I wanted something more dynamite and decided upon the WordPress theme; Canvas.  Hers’ what my website looked like before.

MWDesign Website- Before

I built the website in a “test site” and when I was happy with it, I moved it all over to my live site. I am liking the sliding images; representing samples of work I have done, along with the open, clean feel of the new site and the new “light bulb” logo design.

The footers hold video samples and within the site I designed widgets to hold samples of other work I have done.

MWDesign Website- After

Inside, I have loads of samples showing my instructional design work. Have a peek around.

MWDesign Website- After

Self-directed Learning Skills

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How do teachers, parents, paraprofessionals and other working with children help those students develop self-directed learning [SDL] skills? How can we help students plan for and reach their potential?  I built and co-facilitate this course [within Moodle] to teach the skills necessary for developing 21st century habits of mind.

Participants learn to:

  • Negotiate student learning contracts
  • Teach independent thinking skills
  • Motivate and empower students
  • Become fabulous coaches
  • Build an ePortfolio

There is so much more to learn by participating in this course.  Come hear me and Meg Robbins give a one-hour presentation: Motivating students to becoming self-directed learners. MassCUE 2011.

Open Conversations

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listening2When working with faculty [or others] who already have an online course/classroom, one of the first questions might be to ask, “How can I help you?”

Starting the conversation this way leads no where. The client I am working with can just say, “I think everything is OK” or “I just don’t know what to do.”

Instead I try to open the conversation with something like: “This is a [insert adjective and noun] here on this page and in this area.  How did you come about deciding to add this to your course?

Bam…now, I have paid attention to the professor/client and a rapport can be built.  They can talk about their online classroom/situation and we can both discuss what’s working and what  might need some tweaking.

When working with professors/clients/whomever, I always listen first and then ask open-ended questions  to generate empathy, trust, and most of all, learning…for both sides.

The Five Biggest Ideas On The Future of Health Care Design

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Here’s something that might help when designing educational materials.  While this is geared towards the health care industry, it is an excellent reference source to consider when creating educational materials-especially when we think about The Patient.  Consider your user, when designing your online classroom.

Health Care Design

This article states: “The practice of medicine changes constantly, and your product will have to change as well.” If we think about our curriculum as constantly changing we know our online class materials will need constant changing and updating too.

MassCUE: Connecting the Dots

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Connecgtng the Dots

I spent the day in Marlborough, Massachusetts Connecting the Dots with others investigating some of the hot issues in education.  We rotated through 35 minute discussions and shared challenges, information, ideas and best practices with our peers from around the region.

This event also featured a special keynote, Ron Crouch, who with his amazing ability with numbers helped us better understand the demographics of our region and how that information will shape the needs of the area education organizations in the months and years to come.

 Ron’s presentation was fascinating and I am still absorbing the pages of information and data he shared.

More than just a briefing, this fast paced planning session brought together K-12 district and Department of Education staff to discuss, reflect, and prepare for what is to come.  

I participated in roundtable group discussions on topics such as:

•   Classroom Technologies
•   Funding Challenges and Opportunities
•   Professional Development
•   Social Media
•   Online Learning and Digital Content

It was a day well worth the foggy drive out east.

I am looking forward to presenting at the Massachusetts Computer Using Educators’ [MassCUE’s] 2011 Annual Technology Conference, This 2-day event-October 26 & 27th, 2011- is co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Computer Using Educators and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents [M.A.S.S.].

MassCUE 2011