Digital Blog Post #I

Chapter 4: Designing Lessons and Developing Curriculum with Technology

After doing observation hours in several first-year teacher's classrooms, they all seemed to agree on one thing-  the hardest part about being a teacher is lesson planning. Designing lesson plans can be extremely difficult at times, especially if you don't have a whole lot of time to plan in advance. Even though there are certain guidelines that must be followed and national curriculum frameworks define what will needs to be taught, there's still quite a bit of room for creativity, and teachers still need to plan exactly what to teach every single day. Whenever teachers actually teach a lesson to their class, they chose the exact academic content they wanted to teach their students that day. Using the internet can be extremely useful because it gives teachers access to MANY more resources. The book mentioned that with the internet, teachers are able to have access to "search engines, electronic databases, online encyclopedias, blogs, wikis and other technology tools..." (Page 76).



















Comic made using BitStrips 

The book has a section titled "Web Sources and Apps for Lesson Planning" on page 80 that mentions quite a few of the many resources available online. It gives example of a few websites and apps that can be of help when a teacher is seeking help creating a lesson plan. Most of the apps just help with organization or give teachers access to useful materials like Math Red Free, an app with hundreds of math formulas, figures, and strategies. The websites this section mentions include many multimedia resources such as lesson plans, interactive activities, and videos to show your students. Resources like this could help a new teacher have an idea of what a lesson plan should look like, or maybe even just help the teacher come up with an idea and branch off from there with their own ideas. My boyfriend just graduated from FSW with his Bachelor's degree in middle grades science education, and he always tells me how helpful online resources can be when it comes to creating a lesson plan. He uses sites similar to the ones the book mentions, and says that if you can properly use the internet as a tool to help you create a lesson plan, the possibilities are endless. One of his favorites is CPALMS.org, where you can find standards, helpful ideas, and even example lesson plans.

When creating a lesson plan, you should also have in mind ahead of time how you plan to assess your students on the information you're giving them. Many teachers tend to assess their students however they were most often assessed when they were in school. Lecturing used to be the most common form of teaching. I'm personally pretty accustomed to multiple choice SCANTRON testing, and even though I never minded that form of testing, I wouldn't want that to be my only way to assess my students. I believe that you should have all different types of lessons, and different ways of assessing your students. Standardized testing is another way that teachers can assess their students, and ensure that they are at the level they need to be at in regards to their grade level. For the most part, these tests matter more than any other type of assessment because if a student scores low enough, they can be held back a grade level.

RESOURCES

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Digital Blog Post #H

This Chapter did some comparison of Noncomputer technology classrooms and Computer technology classrooms. Clearly, classrooms without any computers are something of the past, but even now there are many teachers who still don't use all of the awesome technology we currently have available to us! A lot of this chapter includes information on the benefits of using PowerPoint presentations and videos/video clips in the classroom. While doing some of my observation hours for Introduction to Teaching class last semester, I witnessed pretty much every single teacher using PowerPoint in their classrooms. Even though virtually every teacher used this tool, in my opinion, it seemed like almost every single teacher didn't use PowerPoint to its full potential. The PowerPoints I saw in their classrooms were pretty basic, not a lot of colors, images or video clips. It was mostly just bullet-points, paragraphs, and pretty plain backgrounds. I'm not all that technologically savvy, but I know that I could certainly make a more interactive and interesting PowerPoint than most of the ones I saw. I think the reason most of these PowerPoints were so plain was because most of the teachers I observed didn't seem to be all that comfortable using this program. It seemed like a lot of the teachers, especially the older teachers,  just lacked the skill necessary to make a successful PowerPoint. It's a fairly easy program to use, and I think if you incorporate colorful, fun slides, embed some videos and even games, students would be much more interested in the lesson, unlike the bored students I witnessed in many of the classrooms I observed.


Don't get me wrong, PowerPoint is great. You can do a lot with it, I'm comfortable using it (which is why many people don't explore other presentation tools, myself included), but there are other, much more relevant tools out there now! Next-generation presentation tools use multimedia to expand the ways that information is shared in classrooms (Page 224). Of the three mentioned in the book, my personal favorite is Prezi. I was introduced to this tool by my Introduction to Teaching professor and have been using it ever since. It's free, it's easy to use, and you don't need to download it into your computer, which means students can access it at no cost from home or any other computer. It's like PowerPoint for the modern world!


The last concept in this chapter that caught my attention was alphabet books. This concept appealed to me because I would like to teacher kindergarten or first grade, and alphabet books  area fun way to have kindergarten through second graders illustrate their own alphabet books as a way to practice spelling, letter sounds, vocabulary words, and reading skills. Concept books are another great way to help teach words or concepts through digital photography, especially for English language learners or beginning readers. When I become a teacher, I am absolutely going to create my own alphabet books and concept books with my classroom because not only would it be efficient for students at that grade level, but fun, too. :)



Resources
Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.