Post 2

POST 2: Description of a key learning moment during phase one of your artifact's production and an explanation of how at least two (2) design decisions were made (400words).

The artefact I designed and developed was an online educational platform using the Wikispaces website. This artefact was designed to allow students to logon to the website and have all the instructions and information they needed to complete two separate lessons if I was absent from school on a particular day. 

There were a number of key learning moments in the design and develop of my artefact. I think the most significant of these was coming to understand just how the platform worked and, in doing so, it’s possible implications for further and more in-depth incorporation into my lesson and units of work moving forward in my career. By developing an understanding of how the Wikispaces website worked in terms of its ability to layer pages within pages, I was able to foresee how I may be able to use this platform to create entire units of work, or even yearly programs for classes. Indeed, this is similar to how other online educational platforms of such as Moodle or Edmodo are designed to work. While these platforms have some significant advantages and are already in widespread use in many schools, developing my own platform using Wikispaces would have the key advantage that I would be able to design it in the exact way that I chose rather than using a predetermined medium.

The first decision I had to make in the design of my artefact was choosing exactly which online platform to use. As mentioned above, there are a number of different websites that provide similar features and applications as Wikispaces. I originally considered using Edmodo, which is designed to look and function in the same way as Facebook, but found the platform a little rigid. I then considered actually using Facebook as this would have the major advantage that students would not need to be encouraged to check it daily to see any updates I had uploaded. However, with the well-publicised negative aspects of social media use, including concerns over privacy, I chose to use Wikispaces instead. While Moodle has almost all the features that Wikispaces has, the one major advantage of Wikispaces is that it is not specific to a particular school as is the case with Moodle. Thus if I use Wikispaces, changing schools will not mean having to recreate everything I had developed previously. This sealed my decision. 

The second decision was exactly how to use the platform in a way that would be most effective in promoting student learning. In this regard I chose to set up separate pages for individual classes and then have a sub page for each with instructions for the students. On each of these instruction pages I added links to websites where they would find the necessary background information and also to specific activities that I wanted the students to do. I thought this was a good balance of using the medium to its potential and keeping it simple enough that students would find it easy and user friendly.