Pages

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Chapter Four Journal Post

Summary
     This chapter is about lesson planning and setting up curriculum with technology. Lesson development comes from three different parts, academic content, teaching goals/methods, and learning assessments. In other words, what to teach, how to teach, and what the students have learned. These can be enhanced with technology through the software available for presentations and flowcharts and such, along with digital portfolois, online surveys, and electronic tests (pg 76-77).
     After the stages for lesson development we have lesson planning and the ways that it can be done. It usually comes in during the teaching goals and methods stage during the lesson development. The teachers focus on who, what, when, how much.often, and measuremnt and evaulations. These are the details when it comes to teaching. The book talks about Understanding by Design (UBD) which is a three stage approach to setting up a lesson plan. Stage 1: identify the results, Step 2: determine acceptable evidence, and Step 3: plan learning ecperiences and instruction (pg 79).
     The book then moves onto teacher meeting educational standards. This is something that I feel should have been a longer section. There are so many different standards around the country. While the government is trying to set up the nation-wide policy, it is far from happening right now. There are many different organizations who run a different concept in the core studies. This is seen on page 82 on table 4.1. English and math alone have two different councils running the standards (pg 82).
     Of course with standards, the teachers must also worry about testing. The book talks about the three tests that teachers and students must deal with. Norm-referenced tests, which compare students' performances with others in their grade/age, Criterion-referenced tests, which compare students' performances to certain standards/ objectives, and finally Standard-based assessments, which is a combination of both (pg 84-85).
     To end the chapter, the book talks about the use of rubrics and performance assessments. Performance assessments are when a teacher grades an assignment on real-world terms. It is more or less the assessments that actually measure a students knowledge. With so many high-risk tests now being presented to our students, a simply math test or oral presentation seems likes nothing; these are performance assessments (pg 88). Rubrics are not only a way for teachers to organize their own grading thoughts, but also allow students their own checklist as to what they must include in their assignments (pg 90).

Focus Question
1) How are lesson planning and student assessment enhanced by technology?
      Lesson planning is enhanced by technology because of the many sources now availiable at a simply keystroke. Now teachers have webquests, blogs, wikis, thread discussions, and multiple softewares that make there lectures more usefull to students who learn visually or audiblly (pg 77)
      Assessments are also enhanced through the different ways teachers can assign them. Teachers can now give electronic quizzes and tests, which can give the students their grade right away. They can also have students set up their own online portfolois, or the teacher can creat one for themself. Finally they can set up gradekeeping online which can be helpful when it comes to tracking because it is clearly seen (pg 77).

Tech Tools: Web Resources and Apps for Teaching (page 81)
       I looked into the Teaching Channel webpage. It seems to be very helpful with helping teachers come up with lesson plans and providing help when it comes to understnading the new common core set up. This website paired with the Cram app would be a great combo. After I have some help planning the lesson, I can quiz my students on subject as well. 
(The photo below is from my IPad, just before I registered for the channel.)


Resources
Textbook- 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.

1 comment:

  1. As you plan your lessons, you will find many standards from which to tap - all have value, but the real question is how broad or narrow they need to be. The extremes of general Common Core to very specific CPALMs demonstrate the variety out there. Balance is probably the desired result, but even then, it might be dependent on the subject and the individual needs. Teaching continues to be a challenging profession.

    ReplyDelete