Lesson Planning

This week we learned about lesson planning and specifically, integrating technology into our lessons. We discussed the backwards design for creating a lesson as one method of creating our plans. We learned about the three important pieces of a lesson plan being creating an objective, finding a form of assessment, and planning instructional strategies that will bring all students to a competency level.
We also discussed our digital stories in more detail. We discussed the 10 commandments of multimedia projects, and were reminded not to run applications directly from a server, to save early and often, and reviewed other tips for successful projects.
We also practiced our lesson plan techniques with imaginary teachers planning various lessons. The biggest take-aways from our group were to make sure we plan ahead for our lessons, know the materials and tools we are using, and monitor students' activities often. These are all very important things to keep in mind while teaching in general, but specifically apply to using technology with children.

The 10 commandments for multimedia projects are always useful to review. They should be used whenever we are working with technology on our projects or lessons. These are great things to review with our students as well if they will be using the same technology in the classroom. In order to successfully teach our classes, the students will need to learn the rules.
Practicing our lesson planning while using technology is a very practical activity. I have begun creating lesson plans for some of my classes, but there has not been much emphasis on technology as a main piece of the lesson. I really liked practicing with this, as it will help us diversify our lessons when we are teaching.

After reviewing our lesson planning teacher in class and discussing his misjudgements/errors in his planning, I wonder how much extra time and planning it will take for us to plan lessons using technology. Hopefully we will be comfortable with the technology we are learning in class and can apply these to our lessons without too much further review. I think it would be difficult to learn a new tool ourselves and try to apply it in our classes.