Lesson Planning

Lesson planning takes practice, and for those who have done very little, if any, what worries you the most about the process? Those of you who have done some lesson planning, what advice can you give to others?

I definitely fall into the category of having done little lesson planning. What worries me most about the process..... hmmmmm let me think - well just about everything! Lets see here is a list of the things that I could think of.

- Detail - how much detail to put in, you cant practically write a script for each lesson you do but as a new teacher I would love to be able to take a complete script in with me as a security blanket.
- Length, OMG the lesson is only half way through and we have finished my lesson already!!!!
- Complexity - nobody will understand what you are a talking about and you end up needing massive amounts of scaffolding to implement the plan. Alternately, you start going through what you are going to cover through the lesson and get told by the students that they covered everying two years ago.
- Visibilty - is this document going to end up being seen by everyone including the principal as an example of the planning that you do?
 - Subject matter - is this thing even going to be relevant to the students and the curriculum.
- Adoption by students - are the activities planned going to work with this group of students.
- Time - am I going to have time to write out lesson plans for all of the lessons that I have to do?
- Relevance - is there any point to writing out this document - every time I do a lesson I never even have time to refer to my lesson plan.

Does anyone else have any interesting ones ? If so leave them as a comment below.

Hardware in School

In my school most of the hardware that I have experienced has been laptops, smartboards, lego mindstorm robots, video cameras and tablets (also a few phones I guess but these are minimally used).

All of this hardware has been there for more than 12 months so there is nothing really new to report on the NEW hardware side of things. One teacher did try to introduce a Scribe digi pen but I don't really think it took off with any of the other teachers.

In hindsight it is sort of surprising that there is no new hardware to report for the last 12 months. I guess this is a sign that we are starting to enter a phase where digital computing is becoming more mature and we are see more refinements rather than new products being introduced.

Collaboration

Blog posting for Sing et al. (2011)

The first two chapters of Sing et al deal with collaboration between students and the learning process. The first chapter spends some time looking at coop operative learning vs collaborative learning and spelling out the differences between the two.  First I didn’t really think it was necessary to draw a distinction between the two, however later in the paragraph sing etal (2011) goes on to describe how cooperative learning is a stepping stone to collaborative learning. Further more they give tips on how to encourage student to transition from cooperative students to collaborative students. Sing et al observe that cooperative students need to have more structure and goal based learning than collaborative students. This means that as students get used to cooperation  teachers should gradually remove structure and allow students to take greater ownership of projects.

Chapter one also explicitly links social-cultural theory (Vygostski) and collaborative learning and briefly describes Vygotsky’s conclusions that effective learning is a social endeavor. They also talk about the Zone of Proximal Development  (ZPD) and how group work means that students with different strengths working together can benefit each other.

Chapter 2 is pretty much summed up by its title “Affordances of ICT and the Support for Collaborative Learning” this refers to the fact that there are many aspects of ICT that help the collaborative approach to learning.

My thoughts,

For my KLA (ICT) collaboration is a large part of the curriculum and also resonates positivity with me in how I feel an effective learning environment should look. I also thought it was interesting to note that it is important for a teacher to realise that students my need to progress gradually from cooperative learning to collaborative learning  - this has given something for me to think about that hasn’t been presented in other subjects that I have done.

Module 4 - Cox Voogt

In this paper Cox (2012) raises many interesting points.

Cox notes that many teachers feel threatened by technology and feel that it is a disruptive force in the classroom. This does seem true to me although I think that this attitude is changing. I think that school wide attitudes are important in this respect. If teachers generally in the school have a positive attitude to technology then this encourages the less enthusiastic Voogt (2011) confirms this view on page 4.

On page 6 Cox (2012) goes on to say that the first priority of teachers is to order and control in the classroom. This rings less true for what I observe at my school surprisingly, when I walk into a classroom nowadays it seems much more chaotic to me than when I went to school. Students move around the classrooms and talk a lot more due to group work and efforts by teachers to make learning more student focused.

Page 13 - I liked the observations by Cox (2012) about studies into IT in education and how the studies can give misleading results, esp examples like only one computer per classroom and 95% of teachers delivering an IT curriculum only using a word processor - the devil is in the details and often questionnaires miss the details!!

I liked the Voogt (2011) plan for implementing ICT in a school;

Infrastructure development
Teacher professional development
Support
Articulation of ICT in the curriculum
Continuous development and research.




















Cox, M.J. (2012), Formal to informal learning with IT: research challenges and issues for e-learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2012.00483.x

Voogt J., Knezek G., Cox M.J., Knezek D.&ten Brummelhuis A. (2011) Under which conditions does ICT have a positive effect on teaching and learning? Acall to action. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. 15 November 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00453.x.




Voogt J., Knezek G., Cox M.J., Knezek D.&ten Brummelhuis A. (2011) Under which conditions does ICT have a positive effect on teaching and learning? Acall to action. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. 15 November 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00453.x.