Maps and more

This week I am making a Google Map and creating an assignment with it! My assignment is for hypothetical students, as my students would not complete an assignment like this. My idea for this lesson comes from the problem I noticed with many of my older EI students. When we would talk about current music and artists they seemed to have little to no idea about anything outside their realm of existence. This idea is to partly address that issue and hopefully provide a broader world view for them. One of the things we have talked about is how different people, places, and things influence and affect the music we listen to and the musicians we enjoy.  My assignment idea is to have students locate people around the country that they know and make music. This might involve Facebook contacts, family, friends who have moved away, and people they have heard of. Another addition might be places where famous musicians grew up or went to school.
My map includes several people I know via Facebook and LinkedIn, who are either directly involved in making music or have kids in school music programs. Follow up to this lesson might include finding out what exactly these people are doing with music, sharing songs and concert dates, or talking about what might influence the music based on location.



View Who's Making Music? in a larger map

The second part of our assignment was to look at some of the business uses for Instructional Technology and discuss how they could work for me. One section that caught my attention was when talking about Project Managers and Instructional Designers. I could see the teacher as the project manager - solely responsible for all the aspects of instruction: planning, developing, teaching, assessing...It occurred to me that if Instructional Designers could take on some of that responsibility the teachers might be freed up to give students more attention therefor making their jobs more fulfilling and effective. A second area I think I see coming to education is the "better, faster, cheaper" idea. It seems to me the business model is fast approaching education and I think we would be wise to jump on the bandwagon - it may be what saves education. It will change the way we think about evaluation, budgets, accountability; maybe all aspects of education. In the long run however, it may allow us to continue to do what we do. Just utilizing web-based training could save time and money, and provide a challenge for designers to provide high quality instruction.