|
Artifact
Memrise Lesson Plan Reflection During the Professional Learning and Technology Innovations course, I collaborated with a special education teacher co-teaching a math class; together, we created a lesson plan that incorporates technology tools to increase student learning of mathematics concepts they struggled with on a preceding unit exam. During the lesson, students access a shared Google Doc to view instructional screencasts, then use the tools detailed in the screencasts to generate an exam-retake whole-class study guide. The digital tools they use to create the study guide materials are Google Docs, Memrise.com, and Snipping Tool. Students with documented reading disabilities and/or dyslexia are directed to YakItToMe.com, a text-to-speech platform that reads on-screen text to them. Students also take a Google Forms survey at the end of the lesson. This artifact demonstrates my ability to plan for and manage digital tools and resources in the classroom. The Overview section delineates the lesson plan delivery, student work facilitation, and assessment methods. The lesson plan is designed to encourage motivation by first building on students’ prior knowledge through discussion, followed by tool and assignment presentation. Likewise, their participation in the whole-class study guide is based upon their scaffolded learning: they first explore the Memrise course and generate their own mems, or image and text-based mnemonic presentation slides. Next, they evaluate all of the mems creates by their classmates and themselves and choose the best mems to include on the study guide. From critical thinking during the evaluations, they are then able to re-word definitions and insert them into the whole-class Google Doc study guide and to write and resolve a problem based on that concept. The management of these digital tools and resources in a classroom full of students used to math textbooks, paper, and pencils is a challenge. The novelty of using laptops in a math class excited students, but it implied a technology free-for-all to some students who could not keep their eyes off the text messages in their phones and on the laptop screens. Constant monitoring, redirecting, and critical thought prompting was necessary to keep students motivated and actively participating in the project. Had I to do this experience over again, I would set a standard that phones are only to be used when laptops cannot be. When I implement this strategy in my own classroom, I will do so at the beginning of the semester and continue the process with content throughout the semester and analyze the resultant data; the critical thinking required in this learning experience has the potential to be incredibly beneficial to students in the short- and long-term (Gonzalez, 2013). The impact on student learning was measured via post-lesson assessment. The students performed much better on the exam they had struggled with so much before our intervention. Such success led my collaborating partner to push for use of the strategy in his co-taught math classes throughout the school year next year, and I will be utilizing it as well in my English classes. The practice with critical thinking and collaborative creativity with academic vocabulary could lead to big student learning pay-off, measurable by future test and other performance data. References Gonzalez, G. (2013). A geometry teacher's use of a metaphor in relation to a prototypical image to help students remember a set of theorems. Journal Of Mathematical Behavior, 32397-414. doi:10.1016/j.jmathb.2013.04.007 |