Chapter 3 - Developing Lessons

 

Focus Questions: What is meant by "lesson development using technology"?

Lesson development refers to all the activities that teachers do as they create, teach, and evaluate lessons with students. Lesson development involves a teacher's decision about three interrelated elements of teaching lessons:

1) Academic content (what to teach)
2) Teaching goals, methods, and procedures (how to teach)
3) Learning assessments (how to know what students have learned)

Lesson development using technology involved how teachers use electronic resources to facilitate these procedures. 


 Tech Tool : 

I absolutely love this website! I made some entries into the search engine and had countless results. The results were full of activities that teachers could use in a classroom, lesson plans, experiments, etc. 
One of the neat things that I found is that it gives you step-by-step instructions on how to set up and lay out any experiments or activities. For example, I was interested in an activity for stem cell research and it explained every question I needed to ask, how to efficiently communicate the topic to the students, and how to summarize the activity. I find this to be an excellent tool when in need of an activity to tie things together towards the end of a lesson plan.


Summary and Conclusion: 

All in all I do believe that technology plays a big role in the making and integrating of lesson plans in the classroom. Teachers do have lesson plans that they have to make, standards that they have to meet and yet they find the time to make things exciting all thanks to the power of technology. Teachers have a tremendous amount of help using the internet to access lesson plans and also with assessing their students. Many teacher use programs online to assess their students with online quizzes and exams. I appreciate the fact that some teachers also allow the students to monitor their progress in the classroom online. I have always been a big fan of allowing students to monitor themselves and let them be aware of their academic standing. This chapter has opened my eyes to a lot of material that I did not know was incorporated into teachers daily lives.

 Resources:

Maloy, R. W., Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B. P. (2010). Transforming learning with new technologies. Allyn & Bacon.