The Reason for the Seasons

I survived this semester because I had two awesome partners: Brenda and Claudia. I want to thank them for their good ideas, hard work, funny comments, flexibility, and Saturday meetings. I needed their teaching experience because some parts of instructional design are more familiar to them because they have teaching experience.

Our final project was "The Reason for the Seasons." We made a week's worth of lesson plans about teaching sixth graders why Earth has seasons. It was a lot of work! But it was a worthwhile project. One memorable part were the subskills analysis: sitting at my computer at night and thinking about all the bits of information about seasons. Another memorable part was the formative evaluation: seeing the plan in action and getting honest feedback about it. I realized that my opinion about the lessons was not the same as the opinion of my target audience. It was helpful to know what my audience thought and then change our instruction.

As we looked at our finished project, I was proud to see all the work we did over the semester. Doing the project probably expanded my opinion of IDET more than anything else this semester.