Chapter 4- Designing Lessons and Developing Curriculum with Technology

Focus Question: How are lesson planning and student assessment enhanced by technology?

Classroom instruction includes 3 categories that can use technology as an enhancement. To develop a lesson, the teacher must first focus on the academic content (what to teach). This is where the teacher must decide which content to put into her lesson. He or she must choose what will fit in with the required curriculum standards. These standards are very vague, leaving majority of the decision making to the educator. This is where technology comes in. There are many curriculum resources available for teachers. He or she can use online databases, blogs, search engines, academic websites, and classroom technology tools for finding information. The next step in creating a lesson is the method (how to teach). During this step, the teacher focuses on the goals of the lesson or why the lesson is being taught. This is also where teachers will decide their teaching method. This is how they want to convey the information to the students, for example: group activities, case studies, journals, discussions, and lectures. Technology can be used during this step with the use of presentation software (PowerPoint). The third and final step that uses technology as an enhancement to lesson planning is the learning assessments. Student assessment is important and is basically the main reason for teaching. Teachers need to be able to know what the students have learned. Teachers assess their students’ knowledge before, during, and after lessons. This allows them to see their academic progress. We can assess students while using technology. Teachers can give online tests and quizzes and they can also use technology to record student grades. As you can see, technology plays a big part in creating a lesson plan as well as assessing students. Technology makes lesson planning and student evaluating 10 times easier because of the resources available. 

Digital Dialog 4.2:

As a future educator, I am an advocate for active learning. I believe that we cannot fully assess a student’s intelligence with a multiple-choice standardized test. I think performance-based evaluations would be more useful for students considering the theory of multiple intelligence's.

1. I do not consider myself to be skillful at taking multiple-choice tests; however there can be strengths and weaknesses for this type of test taking. Multiple-choice exams would be beneficial for students who are linguistically smart (word smart). Students who have great attention spans and love reading would most likely do well on these types of tests. This test form would not help those who learn better actively. An overall weakness of multiple-choice tests would be the strict scoring.

    
   2. As I mentioned in #1, paper and pencil tests would be best for students who are great readers. Students who are more athletic and active would benefit more from performance-based evaluations.

3. As a student, my teachers had used performance-based evaluations on occasion. In health science classes, I had to point to parts of my body and identify my bones. In my high school art classes, I was evaluated based upon my art projects. I never received a paper-pencil test in those courses. I have also been evaluated by creating and presenting multiple projects, such as poster boards, PowerPoint, and a new type of assessment for me are these blog posts. In this class, we are evaluated based upon our journal entries rather than a standard test. When I become a teacher, I plan to incorporate performance-based assessments whenever I can. Even though I would love to eliminate the boring paper-pencil and multiple choice tests, I still feel they are important in our school curriculum. 


            
           Standardized Test Close-Up, a photo by biologycorner on Flickr.

Lesson planning is a huge part of teaching. I have always known how important lesson planning was to the curriculum, but I never really thought about how technology could enhance it. Most people take classroom technology for granted. We don’t realize how big of an effect it has in our classrooms today. Technology makes lesson planning and student evaluation way easier. I can’t even imagine how teachers did it before the new advances. Technology also makes it easier for teachers to meet educational standards.

In my Intro to Teaching course last year, I was introduced to measurable student objectives. I was happy to see this reintroduced in this chapter. Setting student learning objectives creates an instructional goal for the teachers. It is an important part of creating a lesson plan because it focuses on what the student will get out of your lesson and what they will be able to do afterwards.

The rest of this chapter addressed the controversial assessment topic. Many people have different opinions on how students should be evaluated whether it is by standardized tests or by performance. I do not want to go to in depth here because I could talk about this all day. The main thing I wanted to point out here is that no matter what form of test you prefer, each can benefit from the use of technology. We can use technology for preparation for these assessments. We can also use technology for the test itself. Technology is a fast and efficient way to test a student and retrieve a score. Online tests and quizzes can usually grade right after submission. 

Resources:

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin, Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.