Category Archives: Ed Tech

Designing on the LMS Canvas

August 19, 2016 by Susan Detrie

I had the opportunity to build several professional development courses for K-12 teachers on the Canvas LMS. This is an example of how I worked with content developed by faculty at the University of Colorado (the wonderful Dr. Cheryl Matias and Naomi Nishi) for the eCALLMS project. eCALLMS was a grant-funded project to help provide education for teachers of multilingual students. In developing this course in the learning management system, I built it for busy working teachers who needed optimal […]

Categories: Blog, Ed Tech • Tags: Canvas, Course Design, instructional design, learning management system, usability

Courses Without Facilitators or Instructors

April 15, 2015 by Susan Detrie

Designing a course in a learning management system without a teacher poses a certain challenge. It requires great attention to not only the content, but how people can easily follow content. Having taken a number of courses online without an instructor available as a guide, there are numerous solutions available. But what happens when resources are limited you need to make hundreds of pages of content easy to follow? For this course I decided on a numbered grid and inserting […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: instructional design, interaction design, online learning

Education on YouTube

April 15, 2015 by Susan Detrie

Here is a video I created from stock images, footage and graphics I designed in Photoshop. It was created to educate and present new ideas about recycling to students at Teachers College, Columbia University. We often think we know everything there is to know about recycling, and then a new idea presents itself.

Categories: Ed Tech

Improving Performance: Triage in the Apple Store

August 23, 2014 by Susan Detrie

Organizations look to training to address performance issues by employees, but often the solution to a performance problem is more complex. Having been charged with analyzing an organizational performance problem for a graduate class at Indiana University, Bloomington, it was timed perfectly with the crash of the hard drive on my Apple laptop computer. While sitting in the local Apple Retail Store, I started to notice something extraordinary in the way my emergency was addressed. In the past, these issues […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: analysis, Apple, educational technology, HPT, human performance improvement, ISPI Model, performance, technology, training

Flipping for TED Talks

August 19, 2014 by Susan Detrie

Whether listening to TED talks online, through the NPR TED Radio Hour or being lucky enough to attend a TED talk in person, it is easy to see there is something special going on and the media artifacts produced far exceeds the average entertainment product. The power of a TED talk is often the ability of the speaker to make the seemingly inaccessible or boring things we encounter every day more accessible and compelling. Complicated topics like data mining, or […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: educational technology, flipping the class, interactive learning, TED, TED ED

The Art of the Podcast Translates to Class

August 18, 2014 by Susan Detrie

A teacher in one of my graduate classes remarked that she loved using technology in her classroom, but to her the biggest waste of time was the podcast. Why would anyone bother with a podcast? It was clear she had never listened to This American Life . Until that moment, I thought everyone had listened to the NPR show, since its often the number one download on iTunes. Still, it appears the podcast, while a powerful communication tool, has yet […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: educational technology, media, media literacy, podcast, technology tools

Instructional Design and the Global Pizza

August 12, 2014 by Susan Detrie

It can often be challenging to work in a design group and even more so if one of your members is located in South Korea and another member is located in the United Arab Emirates, while you reside in the United States. Yet this is exactly what occurred in a graduate ID class through the instructional systems design department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Our assignment was to design instruction for a procedure, develop a professional design report and create instructional […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: collaboration, diversity, global communication, instruction, instructional design, procedures

Cognitive Task Analysis

August 12, 2014 by Susan Detrie

Task analysis in the context of teaching can seem alternately daunting or just deadly boring or so it seemed to me in a required class on cognition in graduate school. Still I persisted in the readings and analysis we were required to do, and I started to realize a task analysis was a worthy challenge and had something of an addictive quality. Once you start analyzing a task, it is hard to stop until you have unearthed every forgotten or […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: cognitive task analysis, declarative knowledge, learning and cognition, mental models, procedural knowledge, procedures

Revamping Curriculum: Job Search in the Digital Age

August 9, 2014 by Susan Detrie

Redesigning curriculum for the digital age means taking old topics that have been ‘always’ taught a certain way and looking at them with fresh eyes. Resume and career change courses are chief among them in a fast changing world where skills and job titles become obsolete faster than ever before. Fellow graduate students Alex Jones and Jason Nelson at Teachers College, Columbia University and I looked at collaboratively revitalizing a curriculum unit for job seekers and updating it for the […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: Breit, career, collaboration, Franz, job skills, McTighe, resume, standards, teaching for understanding, Understanding by Design, Wiggins, Wiske

Concept Maps

August 9, 2014 by Susan Detrie

The use of an interactive concept map is a breakthrough learning tool. Though the traditional ‘outline’ will continue to have a place in education, some ideas don’t fit neatly into a linear form. Ideas with complex relationships can be laid out and then altered as understandings change and intellectual views of concepts and their relationships deepen. Webspiration is one tool that allows you to build a concept map alone or with a group, and share your ideas with anyone inside […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: cognition, concepts, maps, semantic networks

Defining Educational Technology with Metaphor

August 8, 2014 by Susan Detrie

People rarely think about the fact that color is one of the things we see every day that is systematic, scientific, messy and evocative of everything from the austerity of pure physics, to the emotional states of people, to the human mind at work. In looking at the field of educational technology and it’s many dimensions, color, and specifically the additive colors of light, provides an interesting metaphor for describing the vibrant, scientific, chaotic and changing nature of the field.. […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: educational technology, human performance improvement, human performance technology, instructional design, instructional systems design, instructional systems technology, instructional technology

Graphic Design Portfolio

August 7, 2014 by Susan Detrie

I have been a graphic designer for many years and as a result ended up on the front lines of the digital revolution. When I initially began doing digital graphics, the computer I worked on was the one lone digital device in the middle of an analog, linear world, where it was an arduous process just to layer two moving images together. Slowly digital devices were added, like digital recorders and cameras, software was created and the world over time […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: animation, digital artist, digital media, graphic design, motion graphics, print design, Susan Detrie, web design

Drawing of brain painted with watercolor

Learning from the Interactive Game: Agent Based Learning

April 16, 2014 by Susan Detrie

Agent Based Learning Building a constructivist learning game and walking tour. One of the most difficult things to impart to students, as well as the general public is the meaningfulness, value and significance of contemporary and modern art, here defined as art since World War II. In many respects, the beautiful presentation of paintings in museums has contributed to people’s lack of understanding just as much as the presentations have contributed to establishing an artists place in art history. By […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: analysis, Annette Lemieux, art tour, art walk, Bloom, interactive game, Laurie Simmons, learning, Robert Gober, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, synthesis, technology

Integrating Technology into a F2F Class

March 7, 2014 by Susan Detrie

Integrating Technology with Instruction Generative Topic for the seminar: The Green House We Live In The question is what does it mean to go ‘green’? This unit of curriculum is designed as a seminar for younger or older adults who want to better understand what ‘going green’ means, some ways they can accomplish green living in their lives and how a ‘green house’ connects to a the larger issues of our planet as a home. The ultimate goal of the […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: constructivism, green seminar, instructional design, teaching for understanding, Wiske

Social Media in Classrooms

March 3, 2013 by Susan Detrie

While discourse about social media in schools has often trended towards the negative, using social media for instruction purposes can bring new life to many subjects. Imagine a Facebook book page created by a class for an author or a figure in history, where the class goal is to speak in the person’s voice, post pictures from their life and comment on the texts they read written by the author or historical figure. Some old friends of mine who found […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: education, Facebook, media literacy, social media, Vimeo, YouTube

Writing Code

March 2, 2013 by Susan Detrie

Having finally faced down Java programming and learning to write code for the first time, I discovered how programmers become hooked. Each time you write something, you learn a little more and you realize the power in making a computing device work for you. You are no longer limited by what things have been done for you, but can think in terms of what you might want to do instead. Though it takes time and dedication to get good at […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: computers, education, Java, programming

Snippet of computer code with zeros and ones

To Code Or Not To Code

September 2, 2012 by Susan Detrie

It was the columnist Thomas Friedman, at the New York Times, who suggested that in the future, students in higher education contexts double major in a field of choice and in computer science. Continuing the theme of new literacy skills, it struck me that computer science was a potential addition to the list of skills that are considered necessary for 21st century citizens. Today, students that haven’t hit middle school can be prepared to program by working with programming languages […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: computers, education, programming, technology

Geek Mythologies: Women in Computing

August 30, 2012 by Susan Detrie

Having started working on my masters final project, which was on the subject of women and computing, I began to realize that like the Greek mythologies of yore, the modern world has it own myths, especially surrounding geeks, technology and who is categorized as computer literate. I had read about a scholar in Norway, Hilde Corneliussen, who peaked my interest when she published a book in 2012 called “Gender-Technology Relations: Exploring Stability and Change”. It contained some excellent examples of […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: education, history, stereotypes, technology, women in tech

Multimodal Communication

August 29, 2012 by Susan Detrie

The traditional mode of communication in education has, in the past, been predominantly through the use of text. Without a convenient way to add audio, visual images, video and links to supporting materials, text primarily drove the educational experience. Now with digital technology, learning can occur fluidly in multiple modes with the integration of many forms of communication. But what does this mean for learning? As Cary Jewitt stated in Multimodality. “Reading” and “Writing” for the 21st Century, ” the […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: education, images, text, video

Learning and Technology

August 29, 2012 by Susan Detrie

Living in the exploding and constantly changing digital age, it is not only students who face the task of learning with technology. Somewhere, someone is learning with technology at age 90, and at age 4. One of the most interesting projects I have ever undertaken was designing a seminar course with a constructivist approach, and then looking for ways in which to integrate technology in a meaningful way. You can’t just add technology into learning environments for the purpose of […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: education, technology, visual literacy

Media Literacy

January 4, 2012 by Susan Detrie

Having started in video and digital graphics when it was an obscure field, with few available courses, it has been an interesting life experience to see video and digital image-making go mainstream, and grow to the extent that the average person may discuss the latest special effects in a film with knowledge or use an Adobe product for a school project or a business presentation. While many in the field express concern over everyone thinking they know all about digital […]

Categories: Ed Tech • Tags: education, Henry Jenkins, media literacy, technology

SUSAN DETRIE Ed.S.

Instructional Design and Digital Media.

Category Archives: Ed Tech

Designing on the LMS Canvas

Courses Without Facilitators or Instructors

Education on YouTube

Improving Performance: Triage in the Apple Store

Flipping for TED Talks

The Art of the Podcast Translates to Class

Instructional Design and the Global Pizza

Cognitive Task Analysis

Revamping Curriculum: Job Search in the Digital Age

Concept Maps

Defining Educational Technology with Metaphor

Graphic Design Portfolio

Learning from the Interactive Game: Agent Based Learning

Integrating Technology into a F2F Class

Writing Code

To Code Or Not To Code

Geek Mythologies: Women in Computing

Multimodal Communication

Learning and Technology

Media Literacy