Saturday, January 7, 2012

The Doorway to Professional Learning Communities



If you are interested in taking your lesson plans, training, e-learning, starting your own blog or any type of instructional design, take a moment to review the links below.


Blogs in Plain English by Common Craft: It the video beginning bloggers have been waiting for. Finally if you want to know what a blog is and how to get started this video is for you. It is really for a beginner. I am truly a beginner and was able to take this information and get started. It includes great diagrams and step by step instructions

Edu. Blogs: are just right if you are trying to get started or trying to get your students are staff started; this is the site for you. Edublogs has grown from a single idea in 2005 into the largest and most trusted provider of educational blogging in the world. James Farmer is the Founder and CEO of Edublogs. He’s worked previously as a teacher, Lecturer in Education Design at Deakin University and Online Community Editor of The Age. For students, teachers, colleges, and schools this is the place to start and visit. I found the site useful and easy to start and create a blog. I was even able to share it with a fellow teacher who has started it to help his math students with assignments.

Instructional Design for eLearning Approaches: is a blog truly for the e-learning community. The author is Ferdinand Krauss has both an educational and instructional application in design. If you want to take your designs to the next level, this site is great. It takes you through theories, design, standards of design, evaluation and links to so many other areas to enhance your knowledge and skills. Take a moment to also read and browse the links that are also amazing. It is jammed packed with information and resources.

Internet Time Blog: appears to be by a great designer who understands what it takes to get started. The author Jay Cross has been passionate about harnessing technology to improve adult learning since the sixties. Fresh out of college, he sold mainframes the size of Chevy Suburbans. Later, he designed the University of Phoenix's first business degree program. If you are looking for a one stop shop for beginning designing basics this is the place for you. Take time to read through the post before you get started with instructional design or if you just want additional information to enhance your current designs. It gives you the background information you will need as well as design samples and must have elements.

Blogs about: Instructional Design: Open source WordPress has been incredibly successful and risen from a handful of users to the most-used blog tool in its category. WordPress wants to bring the WordPress experience to a larger audience. So they created WordPress.com, a hosted version of the open source package where you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge. I found this site a bit overwhelming. It is just a site filled with various blogs on instructional design. It would take me a while to go though and find some sites of interest and well set up. It was very helpful however to browse and see various sites. It helped me in determining my design and what to include and what not to include.

Take the next step and start your own blog , it is quick and easy. If you have experienced it, are doing it or having trouble with it; someone else is to.


Happy Blogging






Come back next week for more instructional design information.

1 comment:

  1. Hello, Barbara! Great job with your blog. I could not even tell that you are a novice blogger.

    If I may, I would like to offer a suggestion: When you insert clickable links into your blog, click the box that says "Open this link in a new window." This allows the reader to open the new link while still having your blog open. That way they can easily return to your blog.

    The Internet Time Blog is a really neat blog. I think that I will have to go back and investigate more of the entries and links.

    Thanks for sharing these! Great first blog.

    Serena :)

    ReplyDelete