Chapters 4 and 8

Chapter 4: Designing Lessons and Developing Curriculum with Technology

Chapter four discusses ways for teachers to plan engaging lessons while integrating technology with the actual plan and design of the lesson. What stood out the most in the chapter was how lesson design and development, essentially the elements needed for a lesson plan, can and should utilize technology. Academic content, teaching goals methods and procedures, and learning assessment, are the three main components in the structure of a cohesive lesson plan. Academic content, in other words, what you are teaching, is often dictated by the school you are teaching via the curriculum but even in those guidelines there is always some type of wiggle room to incorporate technology. Some examples of appropriate and useful technological tools include, search engines, electronic databases, blogs and wikis.

                Teaching goals, methods, and procedures, or how to teach, is the vehicle in which your lesson is delivered. The text describes goals as the reasons for teaching the lesson, methods as the instructional strategies teachers use to convey the topic, and procedures as the scheduling and grouping of students and the timing of each activity.  Each of the three components supports each other in the actual teaching of the lesson and can be utilized in the forms of presentation software, intelligent tutoring systems, teacher developed websites and through many other platforms.

                The final component in the structure of lesson planning is learning assessments. Knowing what the students have learned is supports future lessons because they are the determining factors of whether or not you were successful in teaching the learning goals. As a teacher you must adapt for those who are unsuccessful, those who are, and those who have sped through the lesson. Integrating technology into the learning assessments is something that I think is most common in my student teaching placement. In the math and ELA classes most of the assessments that signify the end of a chapter or unit are all online and taken on laptops. In science, lessons are often based off Brainpop activities, mainly Tim and Moby videos. Assessments made during lessons to check for student progression are often informal and verbal.

Chapter 8: Communicating and Collaborating with Social Media

                When reading the title of the chapter I immediately barred social media from the future of my classrooms only because I believe that there should be a barrier between a teacher as an authority figure and being ‘friends’ on Facebook. However on the second page of the chapter, there is a list of possible social media platforms that can be used as bridges for communication between teachers and students such as email, teacher or classroom websites, blogs, or online discussions. In college I have had professors give out their personal phone numbers along with a business line on the syllabus for a more direct line of communication to their students.

                Integrating social media platforms into your teaching has several benefits listed in the text as teaching beyond the school day, engaging students, sharing information with families, building learning communities, publishing student work and energizing student writing. Each of these benefits adds a fresh twist on the classic classroom environment and allow the student to be able to contribute and excel in their academics in ways that are not only convenient outside of the physical school setting but also differentiated for each students individual abilities.   

Chapter Five

Chapter five discusses the engagement of learners using digital tools, as the title states. The chapter discusses different search engines and how to use them, how to properly evaluate online sources, and how to appropriately use the internet as, as the texts states primarily on page 117, “digital citizens”.

Search engines can be used for different types of inquiries such as an information search, information research and retrieval, a free text search, a keyword/ exact match search and a boolean search. These inquiries can be used to research topics or further student learning in and outside of the classroom. 

Although there can be many useful websites online, a search engine may produce a website that can be age inappropriate or may have information not exactly relevant to the student’s inquiry. Several strategies to conduct effective searches include introducing search engines designed specifically for students, to use visual tools and to teach students to critically evaluate search results.

When students are able to evaluate search results they are able to avoid troublesome internet content such as misinformation, malinformation, messed-up information and mostly useless information.they should be evaluating for several different characteristics, but the characteristic that stands out above all in my opinion is accuracy. If a site cannot pose facts with accuracy then they cannot be a credible source therefore other criterion is immediately thrown out. With these evaluating factors in mind students are able to further evaluate a website’s credibility by the URL.

I think the value of internet users behaving as responsible digital citizens is seriously under credited in our society in a multitude of different contexts. On one side there is the disservice of plagiarism and cheating; both allowing the student to cut corners and deceptively pass off information as their own, and then there is the issue of being able to hide behind the computer screen. Over the last few years there are more and more cases of cyberbullying that are becoming so serious that students are choosing to take their own lives rather than face the torment of their peers. There are arguments that cyberbullying isn’t as severe as bullying in the real world, but what students don’t understand is that once something goes up on the internet, there is no deleting it. Students must be taught, above all, to be responsible online and how to safely and effectively use the internet and technology.