This week we worked on social bookmarking. This site was used to link various pages that I have interest in onto a page for other people to see. It also gave me information about other followers of that page, so I can see people that are interested in the web pages and topics I am. I also like that I can tag information about that page so it makes it easier to know what pages I want to go to under certain topics.
    I think that social bookmarking can be helpful for teachers in students in many areas. One thing that I thought would be a good beginning of the year project, is to have each student create one and add websites that they use or are interested in. This can help students get to know more about their classmates as well as their teacher. It can be a kind of icebreaker to find people in the class with common interests. Another thing that I think this site would be helpful for is when doing group projects. Children can team up and then post websites to their bookmark about the subject their are doing their project on, this gives their other classmates a chance to look at what they have found. Another great idea is to have teachers share with other teachers. I know that on my page I have a website to a behavioral assistance program that we use at my preschool, some teachers may not be familiar with it so they could look at my page and then go to the site to learn more. I know that I am constantly looking for new sites for lesson plan ideas and other information to help me in my classroom. If I had access to other teachers bookmarks then it would be nice to see what they like and they use! There are so different things that this can be used for.
    After reading the Back to Trends and Issues, I noticed how the definitions changed over the years. I agree with the newer versions of the definition, I think that they incorporate more things into them then just talking about teaching and media. I find mostly when I, and many other people think about instructional technology, we think about the media types that are used and not so much the processes of teaching, learning, using, evaluating and all the other things that you can do with the media. In my teaching, of a future job, with older children, I would like to teach about the various types of items that are out there for students. I also want my students to use these items, like we are in the classroom, most of the things we have done so far, I haven't even heard off, let alone tried. I think it would benefit children more to do things first hand rather than just sit and learn about them.
    I noticed when reading the earlier definitions, they were short and missing information. However once I got to the definition that the authors of the book came up with, I don't think there was anything missing, it was a pretty long, descriptive description that touched base with many aspects of technology, design and instruction. I think that this book did a great job telling the coming about of the Instructional Design and Technology.