Sunday, January 26, 2014
Focus question: How
are lesson planning and student assessment enhanced by technology?
Lesson design and development is a concept used for
activities that teachers do to create, teach, and evaluate lessons with
students. Lesson design and development using technology includes how educators
will use electronic resources to enable academic content, teaching goals, methods,
procedures, and learning assessments. With technology, teachers can enhance
their lesson plans with greater visual and auditory elements.
Academic content means the facts, concepts, ideas, skills,
and understandings that teachers will decide to share with students. State and national
curriculum define what will be taught in the classroom, but not entirely.
Teachers must choose what will be explained and explored every day. Educators
will be using technology on what to teach. They will be able to search for an immense
collection of curriculum resources and information.
After teachers know what to teach, they will now decide the
teaching goals, methods, and procedures they will use. An educator needs to set
a goal because it’s the reason why a lesson is being taught. In order to
achieve the goal, a method will be used to convey academic content to students.
Then procedures will be set by the teacher and how much time will be spent on
each activity. Goals, methods, and procedures are combined into formats for
daily learning. Technology supports lesson development by: presentation
software, visual thinking software, web-based diagram, flowchart-making tools,
teacher-developed websites, threaded discussions and email, podcasts, blogs, wikis,
interactive software, webquests, intelligent tutoring systems, digital cameras,
movie-making software, and assistive technologies.
Before, during, and after teaching lessons a learning
assessments can occur. Teachers evaluate student knowledge, understanding, and
performance by using learning assessments. Learning assessments can be
summative, formative, and diagnostic. Summative is a summary of what students
have learned at the end of the lesson. Formative is happening as a lesson
unfolds, while diagnostic is preceding a lesson to measure what students
already know. Assessment and evaluation process can be supported by technology
tools, which include: electronic tests and quizzes, gradekeeping software,
digital portfolios, student response systems, online surveys, and learning performance
rubrics.
Tech Tool link: Web
Resources and Apps for Lesson Planning.
The article discusses about how online resources can help
new teachers organize learning experiences for students. It also mentions that
online resources offer examples on how to incorporate the ideas into classroom
activities. The article provides web resources and apps to start creating
lessons and to expand our knowledge as a teacher. Annenberg Learning is a
multimedia curriculum resource, which contain lesson plans, interactive
activities, and videos for classroom use. My Lesson Plan is an app that uses customizable
templates to support lesson planning.
Photo credit to Edtech Blog on Wordpress
Summary &
Connection:
This chapter explores how teachers plan, construct, deliver,
and evaluate lessons. It discusses how teachers can engage students and incorporate
technology into the lessons. A teacher should be able to use technology to
enhance academic content, learning assessments, teaching goals, methods, and
procedures. Technology plays an important role in lesson development.
In lesson planning there are two different
approaches—student learning objectives or Understanding by Design (UBD). Student
learning objectives are the planned outcomes of your activities, not the
activities themselves. A teacher will identify teaching methods, write out
lesson procedures, and state what kind of assessments will be used.
Understanding by Design is set forth in a series of books by educators Grant Wiggins
and Jay McTighe. There are three main components that UBD has: identify desired
results, determine acceptable evidence, and plan learning experiences and
instruction. Lesson plans on topics and ideas for engaging students in learning
are available via the Internet. Technology provides a way to access
lesson-planning templates using UBD and student learning objective models.
The chapter addresses on how teachers assess and evaluate
students. Educators are always designing ways to assess what students are
learning. There are two contexts that teachers discuss evaluation and
assessment: “what teachers do as they finish a lesson or unit to evaluate and
grade student performance, and what teachers do throughout a lesson or unit as
they constantly monitor student performance” (Maloy, R. W., Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf,
2011). This helps the teachers to determine who is struggling and who is not.
Teachers are influenced by three factors about assessment: personal
experiences, standardized testing, and teacher tests. It’s impossible for a
teacher to determine what students think. Some educators believe that test
assessments best define what students know or is able to do, while others believe
in performance assessments.
Resources:
Maloy, R. W.,
Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B.P.
(2011). Transforming learning with new
technologies. (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.
Fbraid. (2008,
February 25). Building technology enhanced lessons. Retrieved from
http://www.slideshare.net/fbraid/building-technology-enhanced-lessons97-03
Your post is very comprehensive in terms of addressing the major points of the chapter, but do try to write more reflectively to include how you might see this in the classrooms you observe and/or in your future classroom (even how it might/might not relate to your own experiences as a student). You can also use the reflection to ask relevant questions and ponder the answer. In other words, the goal is not to summarize what you read, but to react to it. Hope this helps?!
ReplyDelete