When
searching for a lesson plan to use for this assignment, I decided to go back
quite a bit, and wound up using a lesson plan I had made for one of the
prerequisite courses for the Education Program, Philosophical Orientation to
Education, a High School History lesson on the US Civil War.
I
will use the beginning of the lesson to try and figure out how much the
students already know about the Civil War.
Each student will be asked to take out a sheet of paper, and write out
what is known as a K-W-L chart. The
students will state what they already know about the Civil War (K), what they
would like to learn (W), and upon the lesson’s conclusion they will state what
they have learned (L). The students will
then go up to the SmartBoard, which is slowly finding its way in more and more
classrooms, and fill in a K-W-L chart that is representative of the entire
class. This is a good balance of having
the students work collaboratively and on their own.
Next,
we will dive into the lesson itself. A
short lecture will be given with some background information on the events
leading up to the war, such as the building tensions between the North and the
South, and the election of Abraham Lincoln to the office of President. The lecture will be aided by the use of
visuals playing in a PowerPoint slideshow in the background, which I think can
help the students better grasp what is being discussed, as simply hearing me
speak may not be enough for everybody. Also,
at various points throughout the lesson, at times that I feel are appropriate, I
will also be including segments from the Ken Burns documentary series The Civil War, bringing a multimedia
aspect to the unit. Having watched this
whole documentary series several times, I have nothing but good things to say
about this series. While there is
nowhere near enough time to show the entire documentary (it is over 11 hours
long), I feel that showing segments of it can be a great help to the student. As I stated in one of my weekly posts for
this course, I do believe that videos and films can be a great help in a classroom
setting, if implemented properly.
Moving
on, the next segment of the lesson (this obviously will span multiple class
periods) is something that, while it would take some coordination with other
teachers in order for this to occur, could be a very interesting piece of the
lesson. I would speak to a fellow
teacher, either in the same school I am teaching in or, if possible, another
school, and try and hold a debate between the two classes, via a website like
Skype. Having heard and read about the ability
for businesses to hold video conferences with people cross-country (or in
another part of the world), I would like to apply this idea to the
classroom. While many would be content
with just holding a debate within the classroom, and this would probably be
quite successful, I think the idea of discussing this with another class or
school, without the hassle of traveling there, would be quite interesting for the
students to engage in. It will help them
to possibly hear another perspective on the same events that are being
discussed, and as they debate on a specified topic (one possibility would be
which battle is considered to be the most significant on the outcome of the
war, or if documents like the Emancipation Proclamation truly had any bearing
on the outcome of the war), it will hopefully help them gain a better
understanding of the greater unit as a whole.
Finally,
the students will, in small groups, be given a specific event, person, or
document/amendment from the Civil War, and will have the choice to make a
PowerPoint presentation on it, make a video re-enacting it or analyzing it, or
any other idea that they can come up with, and then post it to a group page on
VoiceThread, a website which utilizes “cloud software” to make collaborative
work among classmates easier. The
students will then be able to study and critique their classmate’s work.
Upon
the conclusion of the unit, we will revisit the K-W-L chart from the beginning,
and proceed to fill in the final “L” column, as the students state what they
have learned throughout this unit.
Ian, I applaud your experimentation with videoconferencing and cloud software. With that said, your matrix lists multiple technologies in one cell, and multiple strategies in a single cell, rendering it unclear as to which technologies are supporting which strategies. It loses the precision and intentionality. This also happens in your narrative. Your teaching is buried. For example, in "The lecture will be aided by the use of visuals playing in a PowerPoint slideshow," literally means that PowerPoint is the teacher (!). Similarly, when you write "the students will, in small groups, be given a specific event. . ." the passive language of "will be given," avoids who, exactly, is doing the "giving" and what that looks like. Avoid at all costs the use of passive language, particularly since your task is to be highly explicit about your teaching strategies and the specific ways in which your technology selection transforms student learning.
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