Instructional Technology in Teaching

• artvan.com
• blacksfurniture.com
The exemplar I am using will help students as they look at floor plans for their home interior. These particular webs cite makes it possible for students to lay out the dimensions of each of the rooms in their house and allows them to put furniture in each one of the rooms. The students could just use approximate sizes and dimensions for their room and the furniture in their room but it gives them more of a realistic idea as to how their rooms are going to look. Not only can they put in the dimensions of their room but they can also choose the size of their furniture. So if they have a refrigerator that is bigger than normal they can factor that in to the layout of their kitchen cabinets. The reason why this is an exemplary tool is because the students would not be able to do this otherwise without buying some sort of program, and no one is going to want to do that unless they work as an interior decorator or if they are building their own house. The students are able to get the same information and design from a free on-line source.
Using the internet in this way is an effective use of technology integration because it does involve the students and not just the teacher because the students will be the ones using these internet cites to formulate the look of each of the rooms in their house. They will each be doing their own house so it is personalized to them, the teacher cannot be the one that is placing their furniture and making up their interior.
This technology is essential to the learning experience because if these internet cites were not used then it would most likely be more difficult for the students to understand how placing furniture in corners verses in the middle of walls has an effect on how the look of the negative verses the positive space looks and where these pieces of furniture are situated in relation to things like the windows or the return air vents and other permanent features of the rooms.
This definitely focuses more on the learning task and not the technology because the students will not just be working on the computer for their entire project. They will have other parts of their project they will need to put together using other resources. The computer is just useful for this particular part because it supplements their educational resources outside of their textbooks.
This would be a lot more difficult without technology because even though there are ways through which the students would be able to place their furniture and develop the rooms in their house they would be taking up a lot of time having to draw everything up and so they would end up with a lot of homework in order to get enough information covered in the semester. So in order for them to learn a lot of material without giving them a bunch of busy work that they end up hating and not learning from the computer gives them the visual they need to learn as well as gives them hands on opportunities to create their house rooms.

This would be great for Interior Design classes. It is hard to get the scale correct with all pieces of furniture in a room. Thanks Laura, you're the greatest.