First, I chose to explore my thoughts more fully on the section pertaining to academic content in chapter three of the text. The reason I chose this (brief) section is because, for me, one of the biggest concerns I have as a future teacher is whether or not the content I chose to use in my classes will be good enough to make a lasting difference in a person's education. This one concept is, in my opinion, one of the largest chunks of responsibility teachers have. Although the school system and national curriculum decides a great deal of what a student will learn, it is up to an individual teacher to select the muscles that go on that skeleton... Will the paintings of John Waterhouse be of critical value to a student or should he be ignored in favor of a more modern artist? Will students admire the courage and vision of Alexander the Great, or would it be best to only highlight his campaign? I can think of no responsibility greater than making the final decision on what to teach and what to leave out of a lesson. After all, I will ultimately decide what information my students have access to (more or less) throughout the year, and there is so much I want to share.
Encyclopedias seem to be a thing of the past and teachers today have the wealth of knowledge of the internet. I imagine that this makes the job of selecting content even more tricky. Instead of twenty six volumes of information, I will have endless things to choose from when I begin designing my lessons. This is both a blessing and a curse. I have already learned (as of last week's blog post) that one can download entire lesson plans at no cost, complete with study guides and quizzes, for students on a wide variety of topics. It would be very easy for a teacher to fall into this comfortable and tempting "ready made" style of choosing content based on what is already done for you online.
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| Photo Credit to: Nicole Weeks and to www.Canva.com |
Understanding by Design
The next concept that I want to discuss is the approach to lesson planning called "Understanding by Design", also in chapter three of the textbook. This concept can be defined by thinking about its three components which are shown on the diagram below:
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| Photo Credit to: Nicole Weeks and www.bubbl.us |
I think that this model is very straightforward and simple in design. A teacher will decide what they want students to gain from the lesson and how they want the students to be able to recall the information. Based on these things, a teacher can determine whether he/she should use more visual, tactile, or auditory tools in the lesson. The UBD is a sort of backwards map for teachers. As someone who always seems to work from back to front, I particularly like the way this is set up. It just makes sense, for me, to first think of what a student should learn from a lesson plan before designing one!
Verizon Thinkfinity, PBS Teachers, Gliffy
The third section of chapter three that I chose to explore more fully was actually the Tech Tool 3.1. The very first statement on the page is, "One of the central challenges of teaching is finding new and creative ways to engage students with academic content...." (Maloy, et. all). One of my very favorite books is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I remember very clearly a section of the book where the youngest daughter is struggling in school. She dislikes her cruel teacher and mentions to her mother that the teacher believes teaching girls is useless. I imagine the character's late 1800's styled classroom with blackboards and cold hard furniture, not to mention being smacked on the hand by a ruler should the students appear to not be working hard enough. Today, the teacher's focus seems to be mainly on how to keep the students engaged rather than how to punish them for not fitting into a preset mold. I think that this is a very taxing thing for teachers, but also a very exciting fact. The teachers of today are encouraged to think outside of the box and use their creativity in order to spark creativity in their pupils. Tech Tool 3.1 outlines the use of Verizon Thinkfinity which is a site that (up until recently) offered pre-designed lesson plans and subject specific site links to partners. PBS Teachers also offers lesson plans, educational videos, and blogs for educators to use in their classrooms. Several of my college professors use this site in their classes and I have always found them to be informative, engaging, and academically sound. The last suggestion Tech Tool 3.1 has is a "Web-based diagramming tool" (Malloy, et.all) called Gliffy. Gliffy is used to help teachers plan out the physical layout of their classrooms and more. I am excited to use these sites in my future classrooms and I believe that they will enhance my students' learning as well as my own.
It seems that there is no limit to what we can use technology for in our twenty first century classrooms. We have the ability to focus fully on one lesson plan that requires personal touches because there are sites that have more generic lesson plans already created and available to us in order to allow us to save time and focus on the things we need to. There are useful guidelines that help us think critically about what we want our students to gain from us as educators. And there are hundreds of thousands of sites teaming with information and help. The more I read in our textbook, the more I find myself surfing from website to website in search of tools I can use in the not-to-distant future. I have already begun to make accounts and save bookmarks for several sites I know that I will enjoy using and look forward to finding more!
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.
Weeks, Nicole (2015, September 20). Academic Content Tree. Created with Canva. www.Canva.com
Weeks, Nicole (2015, September 20). Understanding By Design Bubbles. Created with Bubbl. www.bubbl.us
I hope you are saving all of those great websites in your Delicious account! :) You have certainly been exploring some good ones. I think you will find that the content will be more dictated from standards (especially if you work in public school system) than you might hope - where you often have more creative freedom is the instruction. Students often remember the content (whatever it might be) over time because of the instructional methods of engagement so all is not lost. :) Your digital web 2.0 tools are well done and attributed - glad you continue to experiment with them as you'll have many tools in your technology tool box to apply to those effective lesson plans.
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