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Thank you for accepting my invitation to join our Wiki. Thank you also for your assistance by participating in this Wiki to help me with the end of my graduate work for the field experience portion. When you have some time I encourage you to view the short YouTube movie above by clicking on the image and it will provide you an audible/graphical representation of what Wikis are and how fantastic they are.This is the future! I hope you will enjoy a short and what I believe to be an insightful trip into the world of educational/instructional technology.

I have invited you to our Wikispace. Please note that I said "our" Wikispace. This is a collaborative document. You each have full editing powers, you can create new pages or delete them. It is a living document.

As I have learned and experienced during this program, //educational technology// or as some call it, //instructional technolog//y is not just about the technology. That also holds true in the statement that today's educational pursuits no longer can focus on just the academic content subject or genre. K-12 educational systems insist on student centered learning and teachers are to become facilitators. When instructional technology models are added to the academic content student centered learning begins to take shape and collaboration among students and instructors leads to a much better learning outcome for all involved. If the K-12 systems have and are developing this model and it is very successful in addressing all the diverse learning styles and crossing multicultural borders then the higher education institutions are going to have to come on line too and in short order. Students that come from these experiences and begin looking for higher ed choices are going to have expectations of similar methods of instruction and learning opportunities. My field experiences must address each standard of the eight total standards. These will be added to this Wiki later this week.

One of the courses that I took was //Instructional Design.// This course started with an explanation of "backward design" principles. It is similar to reverse engineering. You take a working product, break it down into its individual parts and as you begin putting it back together you look at each piece on its own strength and decide how you can make it better or perhaps adapt it to a need that when completed is a new product developed on a proven blueprint that addresses current needs such as a collaborative technology driven environment.

I also want to invite you view my Wiki that has been my home while I was working on the M.Ed. program. Start with the Comprehensive Exam and you may also enjoy looking at my reflections on the eight technology standards and eight of the courses in my program. Here is the link to reach that Wiki or Google.site as they are also called. []

You might also find it interesting to visit the Wiki of my team when we were taking the Teaching With Technology course. This is a great example of how collaborative efforts improve the learning outcome. The instructor during this 5 week course was only a facilitator. We, the team, had to decide what was important in each area of the assigned tasks. []

Please note there is a discussion tab at the top of our Wiki along with some other tabs. Rather than sending Email to each other with comments just post your discussion in the discussion tab and all members of our Wiki can see it. We each receive an Email notification when a discussion posting has been made or other activity has taken place on our Wiki.

I hope you find your time assisting me to be fun and worthwhile and see how it could be be adapted to many of your needs for your individual responsibilities. Here is an example. There could be a separate page created on our Wiki for the Houston GAPS Newsletter. The Newsletter could actually be created, edited and worked on by as many users as you want rather than having one person assigned to producing all the work or waiting for all the pieces such as photos or articles to come in by Email. I hope this gets you excited and thinking about the possiblilties. It's also a great delegation tool. Thank you so much, Joe