Instructional Design Portfolio

Faculty member
Jim Collins

This ongoing collaboration recently resulted in a compilation of teacher created writing strategies distributed on CD-Rom to students.

Other related aspects of this collaboration have resulted in a full web site, including interactive writing spaces, to assist teachers in the development of strategies to teach students good writing skills.

Launch site

The work with Jim Collins, Professor of Learning and Instruction with the Graduate School of Education, is a result of a mutual give and take. Professor Collins expresses his ideas and then together we develop ways to use technology to enhance learning.

The Apple Grant project involved teaching fourth grade students how to improve their literacy skills by developing their own cognitive writing strategies. This was accomplished with the help of GSE students as part of their student teaching assignment. The GSE students were shown how to use HyperStudio, which they then passed on to their classroom teachers and their students. The students then created portfolios of their writings using HyperStudio.

Another result of our work with Professor Collins includes the Writing Strategies web site which is continually evolving. Jim's research involves GSE students and teachers on how to teach others to develop cognitive writing strategies. His students were also taught how to edit and post video to the web in order to demonstrate the process of developing cognitive writing strategies with their classes to share with others.

A recent project is the development of a CD-ROM containing a complication of writing strategies developed across multiple class sessions. This resource is then able to be used as a teaching tool as his students work as teachers in their own classrooms. Students also acquired digital video skills in order to document the development and success of their writing strategy. The utilization of digital video is a useful tool to use as a form of creative expression for their own students to encourage their writing skills. Collaboration using UBLearns allowed Professor Collins' students to provide feedback and self reflection on their developed strategies.