Design & Communication
Using good design techniques was one of the themes that ran through our ICL curriculum at my previous school. Both the library media specialist and myself as the instructional technologist worked to include the teaching of design techniques in any lessons that involved student generated projects. A big part of our ICL focus was on how our students communicate their learning. In today’s world where advertisers and social networking sites can overwhelm our eyes and ears with information, it is important to challenge our students to analyze the design of the delivery systems and to think how they can be improved.
We partnered with teachers in curriculum meetings to build a design component into the rubrics for the common assessments. This insures that the design lesson will be taught and assessed. Here is an example found in a 5th grade science unit.
As I worked my way through the recent K12 Online Conference, I found a presentation dedicated to teaching design in our schools. The author is Dean Shareski. Think about visiting the conference page and downloading his presentation.
