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=Charleston Day Technology=

//Using Instructional Design Principles to Integrate Technology into the Curriculum//
The purpose of this Wiki is to help create a plan using instructional design principles, for my seventh grade technology students. They are going to develop an online school newspaper, //The Clarion//. Traditionally, the seventh grade students at my school have created a hard copy of a school newspaper that is distributed to all of the students. My goal is to help these students learn how to create a school newspaper and how to use technology to publish it on a wiki.

For me, this is a major project for a number of reasons.


 * I am new to the school and need to develop an understanding of the school culture.
 * Because I am new to the school, I need to learn about the students writing, technology, and photography skills and needs.
 * The seventh grade students are concerned that if they create an online newspaper, nobody will read it. At the beginning of the year, they were interested in creating a hard copy of the paper, not an online version. I have to convince show them the advantages of an online version of their school newspaper.
 * We only meet once a week for one forty-five minute class session. Forty-five minutes is not a lot of time to accomplish all of these tasks.

In order for me to do this, I need to do the following:
 * Analyze my students' needs and create a meaningful plan of instruction.
 * That plan will have to be approved by the headmaster.
 * Find out school policy to see what is acceptable for publishing on the internet.
 * Get permission from parents to allow student information to be published on the internet.
 * Establish a policy, if there isn't one, of acceptable practices and share that with the students who are publishing to the wiki.
 * Decide what should be in the newspaper.
 * Decide how to organize the students into manageable groups/teams.
 * Create mini lessons on writing, wiki design, and photography.
 * Evaluate the effectiveness of instruction.
 * Revise the instruction and school newspaper as needed throughout the year.

Once I am more comfortable with these decisions and the basic format of the wiki, I can engage the students and allow them to make choices about the school newspaper. They will be making choices about the their primary roles and the different elements or sections in the newspaper. Past experience has shown me that the more that the students are engaged in the decision making, the more responsible they will be about publishing the newspaper.

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Resources Used in this Wiki:
Information on Instructional Design models for EDET 722 based on information from: Brown, A. & Green, T. D. (2006). //The Essentials of Instructional Design: Connecting Fundamental Principles with Process and Practice//. Upper Saddle River: NJ: Pearson

Wiggins, Grant & McTighe, Jay. //Understanding by Design.//(1998).