Initially, as I began to create my developer notebook, I was challenged on a philosophical and academic level with regards to my thoughts and feelings towards online education. While a lot of my colleagues are hesitant or skittish towards the concept, I am the opposite...I am sprinting towards online education as a Blended Learning tool. What I began to discover about myself is that I need to stop and check myself at times; asking myself how far can I go while maintaining a learning environment and course structure that is best for my students. In everything we do as educators, we must design with our students and the expected outcomes in mind; using traditional, as well as, technological instructional practices where best needed for our students. I believe this notebook helped me to capture my thoughts and mentally work through these issues and hurdles that we all face as teachers.
As show through our LMS Review, the Designer Notebook tool is an excellent source for comparing and contrasting instructional methods or styles. By jotting our ideas, doing the research, laying that down on paper as well, and then reviewing everything, I was able to work through the decision making process to find the best path for my design expectatoins, desired learning outcomes, and technological needs. This provided an exceptional platform to work through this process.
Most importantly, this gave me a place to be myself and capture my current thoughts and ideas. We are all life-long learners; and through that we are all evolving and changing in our ideas and ideologies regarding education, curriculum design, and instructional practices. By capturing our thoughts and ideas in one place, we can periodically review who we are, where we have been, where we are going, and check our path forward. This allows us to grow, while maintaining a focus on our personal identity as educators and our future path as teachers.
I am not a writer, I often struggle with the beginning of a lengthy essay or research paper. I find once I get going, the thoughts flow. But the “proverbial” blinking cursor on my blank screen has been a dragon I have had to slay at 2 am more than once. This process was different. I found the free flowing, open structure of this journal to be inviting and value-added in the design process. It is something that I will definitely use again and suggest everyone try at least once...you won’t regret it!
