Instructional Design for the Now Generation.

 

Hi I am Teika Hitchman-Gardiner, a student at Walden University where I am pursuing my Masters in Instructional Designing in Education. I work with Jamaica’s main workforce training agency, HEART NSTA Trust as an Assessment Monitoring Officer (AMO) and Instructional Designer. I am an adult educator for over 12 years now. Jamaica now suffers a major shortage of kindergarten teachers. I would love to explore instructional design ideas to develop my skills as I envision a need for this in Jamaica.  

 

This blog will explore learning theories and instructional designing ideas for Generation Alpha and at times adults. Indeed, the classrooms have changed tremendously, from traditional to modern teaching methods.  Hence the title of this blog is ‘Instructional Design for the Now Generation.’

After exploring various blog sites, two jumped out at me: blogger.com and WordPress.com. I liked WordPress but I easily created an account with blogger.com rather than with WordPress. Three blogs were bookmarked, they are, taking a holistic approach to learning design; A Holistic Approach to eLearning Design: Mastering the Craft; and New Era – More to Come.

The Electronic Classroom should be relevant, accurate, organized, user-friendly, and interactive, just to name a few. To develop good E-classrooms there are many components to consider, and so instructional designers should synchronize the elements. The blog A Holistic Approach to eLearning Design: Mastering the Craft explores ideas of how to synchronize these critical components, secondly, the author taking a holistic approach to learning design shares an interesting approach called the “head-heart-hands-voice” approach which speaks about the various dimensions of human engagement relating to learning experiences. I find it important that instructional designers be mindful of how they impart knowledge in the electronic classroom hence these two blogs. With them, I could explore the connection between instructional design and the learning process in a trendy setting. Finally, I am exploring New Era – More to Come because the author seems to be a trainer who wishes to wet his/her feet in kindergarten learning. As an Adult Educator, I have never taught at the kindergarten level. I believe I could garner insights from this blog as I expect the teaching approach for kindergarten, high school, and adults to be quite different. Already I have ideas of things I can do to improve my instructional designing skills just by browsing these blogs and I hope to learn more.

 

Exploring and sharing ideas is important to my professional development as an instructional designer and educator. I am never comfortable with what I already know, and I am always seeking to learn more. Interestingly I hope to gather even more knowledge as there is a cultural difference, I believe in learning from others and sharing experiences.

 

Anonymous. (2023, August 28). Taking a holistic approach to learning design. DESIGN+CREATE Inc. https://designcreate.ca/2023/08/28/taking-a-holistic-approach-to-learning-design/

New Era – more to come. kg learning. (2023, August 13). https://edukate72.blog/2023/08/13/new-era-more-to-come/

Sylvester, T. (2023, August 14). A holistic approach to Elearning design. Inventio Learning Designs, LLC. https://inventiolearningdesigns.com/holistic-elearning-design/

WordPress.com. (n.d.). https://wordpress.com/tag/instructional-design