D/B4

Photo sharing turned out to be much more complicated and irritating that I would've thought. I've never used a photo sharing website though I had certainly heard of them. I've even recieved pictures from friends this way. I found both photobucket and flickr to be a little confusing. It was easy to download pictures (though much slower than downloading them into facebook, I found) but much harder to organize them, change their size, etc. It seemed that each picture that I downloaded brought up a slightly different screen when it was finished downloading.
Because I found the photo sharing sites difficult to navigate, I'm not convinced I would use it with students. Especially because my students are elementary age. One way that I can see students using this service (maybe high school age) is to share pictures without printing them out. I had an assignment in college where I had to photograph every letter of the alphabet that I found in nature. For example, a fork in a tree could be 'Y'. While printing them out was a nice touch, it would've been a lot easier (and cheaper)to simply upload the pictures and share them with the professor and the class. It might also be nice to document different stages of a science project this way. In fact, this photo sharing idea could be used in any project that requires documentation of a step-by-step project. As with anything photo related, the drawback is that students could post inappropriate photos.
In conclusion, I found the photo sharing sites kind of confusing though I can see that once you've figured it out it is a nice service (especially since you can just send the files over to a store near you and pick them up). However, teaching kids to use this service might not be worth the time it takes and they could post inappropriate things.

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The Trends and Issues chapter dedicated to instructional design seemed quite wordy, but once I got past that I realized a lot of their ideas about creating lessons or designing the instruction were things that I do all the time. They suggest a systematic approach to designing instruction. If I were asked about the way I create my lessons I would've never said systematic, but in thinking about it, I definitely do create them with a system. In fact, I sort of have a "blueprint" of what my lesson plans look like and then use that same format by copying and pasting it so that the lesson is organized the same way both in my brain and also for the principal that checks them.
The core elements/phases of instructional design are all basic elements or goals in lesson plans. There is always a section for the students to implement their new knowledge by applying it to a certain assignment. Then that assigment will be evaluated by the teacher. There is one big difference in the ADDIE instructional design method and the one I use. It says in the text that the ADDIE approach is not to be completed in a linear step-by-step manner. I would suggest that my lessons are completed this way. Since I only see the students once a week for 50 minutes, everything has to have a step and there have to be goals about which step we are going to complete each week. Obviously, during the development stage where the students are trying out their ideas there is room for revision, but otherwise we stick as much to the step by step plan as possible. If I had to break down my lesson plans I would say my lessons look like this:

Intro to project ->analyze project example or famous artist influence ->develop own idea based on implementation of information gleaned from introduction and discussion (room for revision here)->create based on developed idea->evaluate finished product

Another disconnect between the ADDIE approach and my approach to lesson planning is that one of the goals of ADDIE is that Instructional Design assumes outcomes can be measured in a realiable and valid way. One big challenge of teaching elementary art is having to evaluate it. I see my art class as a way for students to try out ideas, express themselves pictorally, use new media and techniques and a way to learn problem-solving techniques. It is hard to evaluate the artwork reliably when the subject matter is so open to discussion. In every lesson there are goals for the student to reach, but they all reach them in different ways. So I believe the outcomes can be measured validly, but not necessarily reliably. The teacher must know the student, have interacted with that student, problem-solved with that student and then conversed again when the project in finished to really understand if the student reached the goals of the lesson.