Piloting with teachers & Students - "rapid prototyping" of instruction
Because of the time constraints imposed by both the K12 and the University academic calendars, I decided to spend a fair amount of time "rapidly prototyping" my instructional design for introducing the Zotero tool to the high school faculty and students.
Rapid Prototyping
Rapid Prototyping is an alternate approach to the traditional instructional design. A prototype is an early phase of a system that has the same key feature components of the "real" thing. In ID technology,allows greater flexibility in defining the goals and form of instruction at early stages.(Wilson & Cole, 1993) Designers may opt to use Rapid Instructional Design (or Rapid Prototyping) when the following are factors:• Time• Budget• Environmental restraintsWhen instructional designers are confronted with these demands, the use of rapid prototyping methodologies "should reduce production time because: (a)using working models of the final product early in a project tends to eliminate time-consuming revisions later on, and (b)design tasks are completed concurrently, rather than sequentially throughout the project." (Jones and Richey, 2000) With RP, the steps are crunched together to reduce the amount of time needed to develop training or a product. The design and development phases are done simultaneously and the formative evaluation is done throughout the process. (from Wikibooks )
My goal with the first part of this process was to identify a teacher and a few students with a clear and specific need for the types of tools provided by the Zotero application and introduce them to an introduction and overview that will enable them to 1-understand the nature of what Zotero does; 2-introduce the teacher to the process of creating an account and a group library; and 3-provide them with a working knowledge that will enable them to get started using the tool.
The other part of this process was for me to gain understanding of how I need to modify and present instruction that is clear and efficacious when working with larger groups of teachers. What I'm trying to do is to sequence and simplify the instructional steps in learning to use this rather complex tool for referencing, citation, and collaborative research into steps that are within the grasp of both teachers and students who may not have extensive prior knowledge with working with online/cloud-based tools.
I was very fortunate this week in having a teacher in my school who is just beginning to work with a cohort of students who will be researching topics to present as science fair projects. They will be meeting all summer to plan and share and to prepare to produce their projects. Fortuitously, this teacher had been looking for a tool that would allow her students to both find research references and to share those references. When I sketched out to her some of the uses for Zotero, her eyes lit up and she invited me to give her some of the basics of its use that she could then use with her students and their research.I first demonstrated for her some of the ways in which I have used Zotero. I then had her create a free account, showed her how to use both the Zotero plug-in for Firefox and the standalone for Safari, and then had her create a shared group library. The teacher was very excited and went home to try to work through some of the online documentation on her own.
Some of the information I found was what I had expected. When I worked with the teacher the next day, she mentioned that she felt the documentation online was rather confusing and she had difficulty in doing some of the tasks that she had tried. Specifically, she wanted to try citing references from within Microsoft Word. One of the things I found was that I will be able to break up the instruction in ways that should be easy to apprehend or teachers. I'm continuing to work with this teacher and she has begun to introduce Zotero to her science fair students.
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