Lesson Plan Description
The lesson plan involves
teaching the staff at my school how to utilize a blog to collaborate on
implementing the MOVE curriculum. The
objectives are that the learners will identify, produce and share strategies of
MOVE from their classroom experience. I
followed my original lesson plan closely except that I was unable to use my intended
audience. Instead, I used four adult family
members who had technology skills similar to my co-workers but they lacked the
basic MOVE training. The targeted group would
consist of twenty. My plan was a thirty
minute lesson which included ten minutes on identifying an example to share, ten
minutes on different ways to produce their project and sharing examples and
finally ten minutes on accessing and posting on the blog.
Lesson
Plan Implementation
The learners quickly reached
the goals of identifying appropriate examples to highlight in their blog. At first, they needed assistance with
deciding which ones were appropriate.
Since they were not my targeted audience, I gave them only two examples
to choose from. Even with the choices
narrowed down, they needed guidance and scaffolding to choose appropriate
examples. I modeled the completed
example already posted and then I gave them a chance to discuss how they would
present their example.
Next, they were allowed
an opportunity for hands on work on the computer. The lesson became
disorganized as my students started navigating around to other sites on the internet.
The member of my group that had never posted verbalized understanding and
preferred to watch and ask questions. In
the original plan, I thought this part would take ten minutes, but the students
were finished before I was able to get through my instruction. Constructivism
theory was seen in the scaffolding, and teaching in the zones of proximal
development. Since most adults are familiar
with posting on social media, I should have prepared more questions so that the
learners could describe what they already know. As the teacher I needed to know
what the students know before starting into a lecture.
Reflection
Looking back, the group
that I worked with was not very attentive and they had difficulty listening to
all of my detailed instruction. They were worried about how long the lesson
would take and questioned why I needed their help. They were very comfortable voicing their
complaints to me and it made me aware that my targeted audience may feel the
same way. I coerced my family to do this
lesson instead of asking for volunteers. On reflection, true collaboration is
voluntary so I plan on involving only interested staff to start a pilot
program. I also plan on starting off the
lesson with an emotional video or commercial to hook my learners into a
discussion about collaboration. The point would be to demonstrate the power of
video or audio to create a strong presentation.
Also, it was more difficult than I thought to assess their understanding
since the focus of the group was the technical side of the lesson.
After reflection, the
use of technology for a format of collaboration remains a good choice. Technology allows a format to express a
finished project. It offers great
flexibility in that learners can communicate, collaborate and mentor each other
at all times of the day. Also, seeing
the finished project allows for reflection and thinking about job performance
and the flow of the classroom. Following
my lesson, I expected the learners to feel comfortable with blogging and to be
able to use it in an expressive manner.
My learners did not have a lot of questions for me. Instead, they really wanted to get started on
the computer. I realized that I may have
needed to express more emphasis on the quality of work that they would want to
share for their entry on the blog. It
appeared that it was an appropriate lesson and format. For future reference, I need to consider
strategies to keep my group logging on and sharing. The lesson was successful
in that it pointed out the weaknesses in my presentation and the focus of the
material presented. It also highlighted
that the group enjoyed using the computer for sharing information.
