The Blue Skunk blog presents 7 Stupid Mistakes Teachers Make With Technology.
I’d like to address poor technology planning that I’ve written about in the past.
I think poor planning pervades education and isn’t a problem specific to technology use but one that many classrooms suffer from. There’s nothing new or different about my method and the graphic below. I believe many teachers’ education programs teach this way. However, having an objective and a plan for assessment is a simple step that many teachers skip when lesson planning.
Those of us who teach a prescribed curriculum like Open Court are given our unit themes but then we need to work backwards and identify the standards that apply to that unit and choose an objective for our teaching. For the first grade weather unit, for example, we might be teaching about different types of weather, activities and clothing for particular weather, about the tools of measuring weather…there are different ways to approach the same unit. However, we need to zero in on something specific we want students to learn so that we can assess their learning and plan effectively.
Once we have an objective, we can then choose a technology that’s appropriate to that objective. I don’t think we should make movies, use Voicethread, or start an excel spreadsheet just for the sake of doing any of those things. We choose the technology that fits with what we want students to learn.
Then we must have a way of assessing whether students have learned what we intended. Tomorrow I’ll post an example of my planning.
I agree that we first have to look at our objective and the purpose for the lesson. By teaching the objective with the technology rather than just teaching the technoogy, we are able to show real life applications of the technology. Thanks for sharing your process.
Hi Mathew,
I’ll be following your planning thread with great interest! I’m about to put together a Google Doc for the teachers in my EETT grant that will list the tools I’ve presented (video editing, blogs, wikis, podcasts, VoiceThread, and in2books) with a heading for Activities and Writing Strategy/Standard. Since my grant has a focus on improving E/LA, I’ll be encouraging the teachers to share specific writing activities they’ve introduced or extended through the integration of any of the above tools.
I’ll be checking back to see how my chart mirrors your strategies.
As always, thanks for sharing “from the trenches.”
There’s so much truth to what you said. I see many teachers spend their computer time having kids just play interactive games with no purpose in mind. It takes a lot of planning to coordinate a standards based lesson that is enhanced by technology…