Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

What does an instructional designer do?

Today, February 26th, 2008 I:

1) Scheduled an LCD projector for a big school day called “Hunter Day”
2) Talked to our guidance department about posting an important announcement on our school website
3) Advised the after school program to use google calendar to manage their events and classes
4) Spoke with our elementary school instructional technology specialist about using windows software update service for the elementary school lab
5) Read about 250 rss feeds
6) Started backing up 4th and 5th grade laptops in preparation for re-imaging (using asr)
6.5) Realized each of the laptops (we have 23 of them) had about 80gigs of data, and we only have about 500gigs of storage space left on our external hard drive.
6.6) Panicked
7) Cleaned up a monstrous amount of wiki spam. Banned several users for life. Deleted several articles. Pretty normal wiki stuff, actually
8) Assisted 4 wonderful girls from the elementary school use iWeb. Reminded them that embedded content wouldn’t work locally unless there was internet access
9) Added a class to blackboard for a English teacher
10) Helped admissions department change email from outlook to a web-based email system
11) Helped a science teacher resolve an issue on her laptop. It wasn’t playing any sound with DVD’s, but was playing other music. Fixed it by not using Windows media player
12) Walked a Verizon guy around the school, looking for 2 T1 boxes. Found them, everyone is happy.
13) Told an teacher who lost the combination lock password on her laptop lock should would have to be cut
14) Helped student who accidentally saved a new document over an old one. We tried to rescue the data from her usb disk, but no luck.

15) lunch

16) Continued to re-image 4th and 5th grade laptops
17) Got information from student for new ID cards
18) Told our building Union representative I was still interested in being on the union executive committee
19) Got a group of icons for new school website
20) Discussed purchasing a public address system for our school, and how we should go about it
21) worked on a new template for a website
22) showed the Verizon guy around our school (again)
23) made some suggestions for using NYSSL

On 26 February 2008, Raj inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

You forgot - “Tried to figure out what an ID does”

We had a conversation like this a few weeks ago and the biggest thing in Higher Ed is that you have to rework and rejustify your job everyday because there is generally little understanding or respect for Instructional Design, but that is thankfully changing.