Instructional Project:

Using the Internet as a Research Tool
for Innovation
by Debra Orellana

Innovation is an intriguing process which often goes by the term strategic design and at its root is brainstorming. The thought process for coming up with my instructional project came from my own brainstorming session for constructing the lesson plan. I thought why not have students participate in a brainstorming session as part of the hands-on activity for the instructional project? And the second part to the hands-on activity would be for students to actually explore online resources to find out if their inventions were already patented using Google Patent and Trademark search, typing Google "key words" or using the U.S. Patent and T.M. Office: Patft.uspto.gov.  The ability to divide the presentation into two lessons helped in constructing and organizing the PowerPoint presentation. The lesson was intended for eleventh grade High School to College students and adults.

To design the slides, Piktochart was used. It was easy to sign-up with a Google account and the choice of type, colors, basic shapes, and available backgrounds helped to keep my layouts somewhat coherent. Once a slide was created, I used Grab on my mac to select the portion of the slides to use and saved the slides as jpeg images. This made it easy to bring in the images into my PowerPoint presentation file. It was quick, although to go back and edit a typo in Piktochart was not as easy. I would use this process again if needed. The colors in Piktochart are vivid and the menu items easy to work with helping users create captivating layouts and info graphics to help keep students interested. https://magicpiktochart.com/editor.

The introductory slides for lesson goal 1. Learn the Internet Research Process, provided students with a circular diagram with the following six points:

• Questioning before conducting an online search
• Planning the sites to explore prior to going online 
• Gathering online resources and information
• Selection process, including sorting and categorizing data
• Integration of information into given lesson drawing conclusions 
• Evaluating results and repeating the process as needed
(Florida Center for Instructional Technology College of Education, University of South Florida, 2014). 

Lesson goal 2. described the process of innovation as defined by Jay Doblin in 1978: 
• Alteration: intentional changing a product not necessarily improving its design
• Improvement: finding and fixing a deficiency or flaw either caused by technical or human error
• Invention: a dramatic innovation that starts or changes an entire field(Doblin Group, 2014).

The assessment for this lesson plan was also included in the presentation, describing the requirements for a five page research paper.

In creating my instructional project, I had the opportunity to learn some of the educational processes necessary to create a student lesson plan while incorporating how to teach research in a technology-driven world. I really enjoyed this project and the resources provided for our class readings on how to construct lesson plans.