A-SSURE Fire Way to Plan a Lesson

A-SSURE-fire way to plan a lesson

            For the last two weeks, my friends and I from group five have been working on creating a lesson plan in ED271 to teach the math concept of fractions to elementary third or fourth graders.  We decided to focus our lesson plan on the ASSURE model which is an Instructional Systems Design (ISD) modeled to guide our lesson planning.  The model ensures that we Analyze learners, State lesson objectives, Select instructional methods, media, and materials, Utilize media and materials, Require learner participation, Evaluate and revise learning.  Although this assignment took over twelve hours of preparatory time to plan, while working together as a group I have personally learned many new lesson-planning basics and advanced techniques that I will use in my future classroom.  
            Our planned lesson centered around teaching the concept of Mathematical fractions of a circle and how to solve associated word problems in addition to learning how to create fictional story to solve that problem and compose it using digital multimedia.  Their evaluation of learning will be in the form of creating a digital storyline, which depicts fictional characters faced with a fractional problem to solve.
            Although this lesson would accomplish many different curriculum standards, I felt that two NETS*T standards apply.  The first one, NETS*T 2A standard to “design developmentally appropriate learning opportunities that apply technology enhanced instructional strategies to support the diverse needs of learners” ensures that the instructor uses digital media such as presentation slides, online resources and audio/visual resources to tap into the different types of learners in our classroom (ISTE, 2008).  In addition, the NETS*T 3C standard to “apply technology to develop students’ higher order skills and creativity” ensures learner-based mastery of the newly learned Mathematical concepts as they will collaborate in groups and with each other to create a digital story (ISTE, 2008).
           The area that required the most attention and proved to be the most difficult was developing the lesson plan activities.  According to Campbell et al., “instructors would be most effective when they truly understand the different learning styles of their students.  These learning styles include, kinesthetic, visual, linguistic, cognitive, visual-spatial, intrapersonal, interpersonal and mathematical” (Campbell et al., 2004).  For our lesson to be successful to our projected elementary grade level, we needed to ensure that we analyze our learners properly and ensured that we had activities that targeted a range of learning styles.  To reach our kinesthetic and visual learners for example, we will use 6” color-coded cutouts of circles (black) and 1/2 (green) – 1/4 (yellow) - 1/8 (purple) fractional pieces to give students physical and visual cues to the understanding of fractions.

            For the linguistic learners, they would be challenged by the word problems that they will encounter as part of our lecture.  Finally all the students including our projected student with a disability will have to employ inter-personal learning skills as they work together in groups and with the class as we solve fractional word problems together.   Overall, I learned that planning developmentally appropriate lesson activities takes a lot of mindful planning of the instructor.   Also, even with these detailed plans, it may take continual refinement after execution with your students as diversity in the classroom could change these plans instantaneously.
             For the students to create and publish their digital stories, we modeled the use of a free, educator-friendly web service called voicethreads® available at http://www.voicethread.com.   As a group, we learned to use this incredible resource to publish presentation slides that were made from our favorite presentation software such as PowerPoint® or Keynote® or publish videos created from MovieMaker® or iMovie®.  In addition, we learned that this free service allows us to collaborate multimedia with other instructors around the world.  We could create discussions, offer feedback to posted curriculum or simply just to share our ideas in this multimedia environment.  For this assignment, we explored setting up automatic web-slides and digital video with voice-overs to narrate our digital story example. This is a useful web resource that I will definitely use in my future classroom to enhance my Professional Learning Network and maybe even have my students use it to collaborate their work and enhance their educational digital literacy beyond ubiquitous social networks such as Facebook®.
            My experience with this assignment has me troubled.  The valuable instructional time required to teach the digital story making tools seems too much.  What I did not enjoy about this project was how I was not 100% sure if our lesson plan’s focus was to teach a content lesson or to teach how to use digital tools to create a digital story.  For example, if this lesson plan was for a Mathematics class, if we were to implement just the content lesson, then the actual instructional time would fall into one 50 minute block typical of an GDOE elementary school.  But if we were to teach our students to learn how to use the digital tools to create a digital story, this could take anywhere from one to two 50 minute blocks of Mathematics instructional time.  This may not even be enough time due to the various required functions of each digital tool (MovieMaker or iMovie) that need to be reviewed.   As I see it, our students may have already mastered the Mathematical content of our lesson and could have been evaluated with a much simpler method so that we can move on to new lessons to scaffold their learning.  I’m afraid that teaching how to use the digital tools and requiring students to use the digital story as a way to evaluate their learning of a concept may take away valuable Mathematics instructional time that they could use to master the concept and move on to new lessons.
            On the other hand, if this lesson plan were directed for an elementary digital literacy class, then this lesson plan to teach the tools to make a digital story would make complete sense and use of instructional time.  That way, mastery of the content would take place in the respected content-area class of digital literacy and the focus on teaching and implementing digital tools to create a digital story would be highly applicable.  The way I see this lesson plan work well, is if the content-area teacher work together with the digital literacy teacher to co-develop a cross-content lesson plan which allows ample time for instruction in both classes. 
            In conclusion, this assignment has been a successful introduction to digital literacy lesson planning.  I have learned about the standards set forth by the International Society for Technology in Education and how to align my lesson plans with those standards.  I’ve learned that choosing learning activities takes mindful planning based on my student’s learning styles and content standards.  Finally, I feel that the implementation of the digital story evaluation for content mastery is a creative way to get students involve in learning through group collaboration and digital media. 
          

References

ISTE (2008). National Educational Technology Standards (NETS•T) and Performance Indicators for   Teachers. Retrieved September 27 2010, from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/NETS_for_Teachers.htm.

Campbell B., Campbell L., Dickenson D. (2004).  Teaching and Learning Through Multiple Intelligences. Boston, MA: Person Education, Inc.