Reflection of Current Practices:

Brock Hoffman

bshoffman@vt.edu

3/31/22

Definition of Technology: The application of knowledge, processes, and devices for a practical purpose
to efficiently achieve a goal.

Definition of Instructional Technology: The application of knowledge, processes, and devices for a
practical purpose to yield a predetermined outcome that will affect learners in a way that learning is
facilitated.

Design:

- As I look at my experiences throughout the ITMA program and how my perspective has changed
on different aspects I see it start to come to fruition when I am applying it to real world
scenarios. At the beginning of 2021 and still to this date I created and am a group leader of
athletes on the Virginia Tech football team that works to help give back to the local communities
around Blacksburg as well as the hometowns of the group members. As I knew when designing
something it takes well thought out planning so me and our Director of Player Engagement had
multiple meetings on how we are going to design this group and what are the things we could
possibly do. One of the things that I struggled with early in the group design process was finding
enough people that had time in their schedules to meet weekly as well as actually do the
community service. One of the ways I worked around this since we were out of season was to
schedule a quick meeting on Wednesdays because all we had was a recovery workout and
nothing else the rest of the day football wise. In doing this it allowed the group to gain more
athletes. As we met as a group designing the projects we wanted to achieve we had to all voice
our opinions on what we individually and collectively valued to know which type of projects we
wanted to take on. After a couple meetings it was nice to design our schedule around
specifically what the group was trying to accomplish as well as who we were targeting
specifically. This experience of designing a group of members to help out the community and
give back was something that seemed to be pretty easy due to my experience in course work
with design in the ITMA program it was just different in terms of not designing something for
instruction. I believe having my experience through ITMA allowed me to really have confidence
in designing the group and made the overall process successful.

Development:

- Picking up off the group I designed and lead it felt like the majority of our time early on was
spent in that design process identify our goals and coming together as a group to design the
best possible schedule possible to help as many people in need as possible. Because we took our
time designing what we wanted to accomplish the development phase was fairly easy we
started off by developing a plan of action for each community service opportunity. Within those
plans of action, it gave us a time frame for when we started to work on the project as well as
 when it needs to be completed, the specific things we need for the task (ex. Paper, note cards,
pens, books, magazines, etc.), and after that it had a step by step course for us to follow.
Following along the plan of action allowed us to develop some pretty neat and helpful
community service opportunities for people connected to VT. This experience of developing a
plan of action for my group was similar to the plan of action I would create for myself personally
at the beginning of the semester for my course work in ITMA. I would say this process for this
task was very successful as it kept me on a schedule and routine to follow.

Utilization:

- When it came to utilization for my community service group a problem we faced was I needed
to find a way we could all be on the same page besides just making a group message and
sending out reminders. In order to solve this problem, I scheduled a meeting with our Director
of Player Engagement and she allowed us to utilize the app called TeamWorks. This is an app
many teams use across the country that allows coaches to group text players and it even has a
digitalized schedule that allows you to input things and will send people reminds on its own. This
app was a huge success for us because it allowed us as a whole to be on the same page know
exactly when we had meetings and events as well as sent us reminders for such as well as
reminders to make sure we are on track with our work. Overall with this task in terms of our
group it allowed us to utilize an online application which is a form of technology to keep our
group organized and keep us on the same page. This was a similar experience to me when I was
a member of the Team Leadership Council on the VT Football team which was a group organized
to promote leadership on the team. We used the TeamWorks app for this council in order to
send out when we were meeting.

Management:

- As I mentioned at the beginning being the leader of the group and having to manage everything
really came fairly simple with my experiences being the team captain of the football team as
well as the knowledge I have gained in the ITMA program. One of the things I felt was difficult to
manage was finding different meeting times at the beginning of each segment in the year with
schedule changes. I overcame this through the communication skills and figuring out how my
teammates best responded to get everyone on the same page and make sure people stayed
committed to the grind of the workload we were going to have to put in. Being a team captain
and a member of the leadership council for the VT Football team has given me a very similar
experience to this as I dealt with communicating to the different players and figuring out the
best ways to get across to them. I would say this experience is different than the management I
am doing right now in my Project and Report course as I am managing a project on the creative
media side of things for VT Football, this is more of a small group work and allows me to give
more personal attention and management.

Evaluation:

- With the group I started beginning in the Spring of 2021, I knew things would change upon
completion of segments within the year. Being a football player at VT we only really get the
month of May off from school or football so I knew things would look different for us in the
Summer of 2021, Fall of 2021, and now Spring of 2022. At the end of each segment our
group would have a meeting and each member would have to evaluate the last segment
we went through and figure out what went wrong and what when right. Doing this and
having my knowledge from ITMA it allowed me to see our evaluations with a different
perspective then others in the group. After collecting all the information, we as a group
combined our knowledge gained and put together a plan on how to improve the group for
the next segment. I would say this form of evaluation for tis group was very successful
because it allowed us to keep our schedule fluid and up to date and didn’t force us to have
to stay to a strict schedule no matter the segment in the year. This experience of
evaluation was different than my previous experience with my evaluation conducted in
Program and Product Evaluation where I conducted an evaluation on the online tutoring
service provided to student athletes at VT. The difference in this evaluation was it was a
one-time evaluation whereas for this group we were consistently evaluating.