Digital Blog Post # I - Chapter 4

Designing Lessons and Developing Curriculum with Technology

When teachers oversee a class they need to have a plan, rushing into a lesson with no prior planning can be fun in that students may be engaged in the spontaneity. Although, this tactic is not always successful just as anything else in life. Educators should follow a curriculum and lesson plans for their classroom. This chapter discusses how to make a lesson plan that follows the standards of the school, keeps students engaged, and properly evaluates the children.

Topics of interest:

1.  Lesson Development
2. Assessing and Evaluating Students
3. Approaches to Lesson Planning
1. Student Learning Objectives
2. Understanding by Design

1.) 

If you are not able to see the Emaze presentation please click this link - Lesson Development

2.) Individuals that finally become educators keep many of the habits of teachers that they've had over the years. New teachers may give long lectures, assign hours of homework, or any number of teaching strategies. What many new educators struggle with is how to properly evaluate the students in their classroom. The book provides several different strategies, none of which are the "perfect" way but can be useful in what they are trying to accomplish. Some of the ways to evaluate students may be obvious such as classes that prepare for standardized testing and others that are more customized to helping students creativity grow. An interesting topic brought up in the book states that technology is a very important and successful tool for assessment but, for elementary it may not be as effective. This is due to the fact that a good portion of what children learn in elementary school can not be given an exact percentage. So standardized testing was put into place to get accurate percentages but setting a bar that not all students can reach does not seem like the best course of action either.When broken down to its core schools and educators should be making curriculums that give students a hunger to learn more about a particular subject. Standardized tests have their purpose but they do not always accurately define the level of intellect that a student is at.  James Popham states it best, "We must evaluate students so we can make more appropriate decisions about how to educate them." (2010,p.5)

3.)  When organizing a lesson plan a teacher has to choose whether it will be following one of two approaches: the Student Learning Objectives approach or the Understanding by Design (UBD) approach.

Student Learning Objectives provides guidelines that students have to follow. The teacher tells who,what,when, how much, and lastly how it will be evaluated. It is the more commonly used of the two types of lesson planning because it has been used for a much longer time. UBD which is different in its approach, is very interesting and was first discussed by two educators, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (1998,2007, 2011).  It has three distinct stages, the first has the teacher find the enduring understanding which is the "big idea of the lesson and then the essential questions which is just a way of organizing information for students. The second stage has the teacher making assessment strategies to show what the students will have learned once they complete the lesson. Finally, the last stage actually has the same steps as the Student Learning Objectives approach. Understanding by Design may take some more time to complete but though the help of technology it is much more
beneficial for the students.


References:

• Maloy, R. (2011). Designing Lessons and Developing Curriculum with Technology. In Transforming learning with new technologies (2nd ed., pp. 74 - 95). Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
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Digital Blog Post # H - Chapter 9

Photo credit to Denise Krebs on Flickr

Expressing Creativity with Multimedia Technologies

This chapter will talk about sharing information through the use of digital technologies. Teachers in the past have always had at least one project that has a student present to the classroom. In these lesson plans students go to the front of the class and speak about the topic that they have researched. This is a necessary step in building up confidence and speaking skills for students but what if there was a way to make the audience bigger, much bigger. By using multimedia technology a student can share their work with the world and not just through one way. There are Podcasts, PowerPoint's and even things that are generally overlooked as entertainment like YouTube. Learning should not be restricted to just what a teacher creates either, for so long teachers have had their thumb on how their students should learn but the world is diverse just like a classroom. Students should be aloud to also create because their imaginations are most likely greater than their own teachers and not only does it allow students more freedom with learning but it also grants them the feeling of confidence. Building something from nothing is satisfying especially when not only the classroom will see the effort and work put into the project.

Topics of interest in this chapter:

1. Next-Generation Web 2.0 Presentation Tools
2. Video in the Classroom

1.) Some very useful websites to incorporate into lesson plans:

1. Prezi - a website that allows users to create their very own presentations that allow many different modifications like zooming in and out of slides and creating personalized paths for views to take.
2. Animoto - allows the ability to create videos using pictures and sound clips. 
3. Glogster - a multimedia technology that allows the creation of blogs that can be customized in-depth. 

With good instruction these three websites can be used to move learning to a higher level much faster. Educator must be equipped with the right tools for their job just like any other profession.

2.) Using video in classrooms opens up a new way of learning because it is multimodal keeping the level of interest high for students of all ages. What's interesting about integrating video into classrooms especially in the 21 century is that children feel at home with technology and will be more open to using it for learning. The majority of the iGeneration spends much of their time on a computer rather than in front of a TV so it would make sense for teachers to follow suit.

Our sight is our most important sense, people depend highly on its ability to understand the world. To explain something without seeing it can be a timely task but through the use of technology students that suffer in school because their lack of visual aides have a better chance. Although, this does assist visual learners, they are not the only students that will benefit from video lessons.



Reference:

Maloy, R. (2011). Expressing Creativity with Multimedia Technologies. In Transforming learning with new technologies. Boston, Massachusetts: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.

Digital Blog Post # G - Chapter 10

Promoting Success for All Students through Technology

Educators have a very difficult job that requires them to be skilled with not only their desired age group or level but also with areas that they may not be comfortable with. Diverse is what a teacher should be because every student that walks into a classroom has a different struggle. This chapter addresses the students that have disabilities or impairments and gives information on how to teach them.


Topics of interest in this chapter:

1. Differentiated Instruction and Universal Design for Learning

1.)

By jperry410 | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

By jperry410 | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

Universal design and differentiated instruction are related in that they are both trying to help students learn in their own way. Universal design is more controlled by the teachers lesson plan and curriculum. Differentiated instruction is where an educator allows for more collaborative work. There can be many different types of learners in one classroom at a time and to engage them all with a single approach doesn't seem fair. The three main types of learners are auditory, kinesthetic and visual. The three are used together most of the time to learn but one or two can be more dominant. Although it may seem strange to excel in one area it does not mean that it is still not a gift that can be used. How can the auditory learner (learns better by hearing) get the best out of an assignment that must be read silently in class? A way to fix that issue would be to make a lesson plan that requires students to read aloud in groups. Educators need to engage students and keep them hungry for knowledge. It is interesting to see that there are still many educators who are monotonous in the way they teach. They have been teaching the same way for 20 years and sometimes more. How can teachers expect their students to grow if they themselves are stuck in their 3rd or 4th year of teaching? A way to avoid being trapped in a repetitive routine is to connect with students and make lesson plans that will allow them to reach their personal potential.

References:

Universal Design for Learning (UDL). (n.d.). Retrieved March 2, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaSZqgr2eUM

Maloy, R. (2011). Transforming learning with new technologies (Vol. 2, pp. 244 - 273). Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.