Technology Resources for PSI Teaching Seminar G:http://learnteachwu.weebly.com/1/post/2013/10/ksa-10-technology-resources.html
On Thursday, I delivered my 15 minute microteaching to my teaching seminar class on:
KSA #10: Teachers apply a variety of technologies to meet students’ teacher/ learning.
Overall, even though there's still a lot of room for improvement, given the amount of time, I feel it was a successful lesson.
What is KSA?
KSA stands for Knowledge, Skills and Attributes. There are a total of 17 KSAs that intern teachers (in their first two years of teaching) must follow to guide their teaching. Intern teachers must demonstrate proficient application and understanding of these 17 KSAs in order to be qualified for their Permanent Alberta Teaching Certificate .
To find out about the other KSAs, please visit the Alberta Education Website: http://education.alberta.ca/department/policy/standards/teachqual.aspx
What does KSA #10 mean?
"Teachers use teaching/learning resources such as the chalkboard, texts, computers and other auditory, print and visual media, and maintain an awareness of emerging technological resources. They keep abreast of advances in teaching/learning technologies and how they can be incorporated into instruction and learning. As new technologies prove useful and become available in schools, teachers develop their own and their students’ proficiencies in using the technologies purposefully, which may include content presentation, delivery and research applications, as well as word processing, information management and record keeping.
Teachers use electronic networks and other telecommunication media to enhance their own knowledge and abilities, and to communicate more effectively with others. "
From <http://education.alberta.ca/department/policy/standards/teachqual.aspx>
LESSON OVERVIEW:
Based on the definition of KSA #10, I generated three objectives for the lesson:
- Students will explore resources that will help them stay tech savy in the classroom
- Students will research for technologies and tools they can integrate into their future classroom
- Students will create a collaborative shared document of online resources for the class to leverage
Lesson Plan Summarized:
- For the introduction, we used PollEverywhere.com to create a word cloud of technology that have been demonstrated in PSI
- In the Activity, students explored various resources compiled by other teacher colleagues on various social media, blogging, interest sites and start to generate a shared Google Spreadsheets of resources they found valuable.
- I brought the lesson to a close by having student share a resource on Twitter and re-insuring students that they will gain access the data they gathered. (definitely could have done better here)
Technology Integrated:
- PollEverywhere.com
- Google Form
- Padlet.com
- Good old paper!
TEACHING REFLECTION:
Rather than examining strengths and weaknesses, I want to highlight the successes with this lesson and also areas for improvements in my teaching strategy.
Successes
Students generated a great list of resource as a class that they can build upon. Students created an extensive list of resources they have seen already and start on compiling a list of online teacher resources/ community. Given that the student group for this lesson are all pre-service teachers, this lesson, I would say, can be of value and use to the students.
Integrating technology into the lesson: I feel I was successful in integrating technology into my lesson even though I did not utilize any additional tools that the students haven't seen before. In the lesson, I integrated PollEverywhere to gather students prior knowledge, Google Form as Survey, Google Spreadsheet to gather survey results, Padlet for Sponge Activity. I did this because of time considerations. I understood that it will take additional time for students to learn other tools and with the given 15 minutes I felt that it would not had been an effective use of time. The lesson would had taken longer if I chose to use new technologies
Attention Getters: Even though, we been shown multiple different attention getters throughout the different sessions, I'm still struggling to identify what attention getters would work best in what kind situation. Being rather soft spoken and introverted individual, I'm still working on identifying ways to get students attention without having to raise voice and be respectful to the students. These are the attention getters that worked for me in this lesson:
- "When you're ready, raise your cellphone in the air": This attention getter was effective because I knew that the students need their cellphone in their next activity. By thinking ahead of time for the materials that the students need will reduce the transition time proceeding into the activity.
- "Clap once if you can hear my voice, clap twice if you can hear my voice": This attention getter worked because I'm rather soft spoken and not every students may hear my voice if they are engaged in something else. By leveraging the student's handclapping, I can eventually get all the students attention and be respectful to this discussion.
Area for Improvements
Be more explicit in connecting lesson to objectives: I found that even though I was successful in demonstrating and integrating various technology into the lesson: PollEverywhere, Google Form, Google Doc and Padlet. I wasn't explicit about connecting the lesson back to the meaning of KSA #10. This could had easily been done by asking a closure question of: "What are some strategies that we have used in this lesson to address KSA #10?" This will encourage students to make the connection between the activities that they did with the definition of the KSA and objective.
Improve Engagement: The lesson was designed so that students were working in partners and focused more on self learning than instructor lecturing. I found, however, it was very easy for students while on the internet to stray from the lesson. I think to improve engagement, I will need to speed up the pace of the lesson, break it down to smaller steps and do check points along the way, as well ask questions to encourage discussion of the topic.
Attention Getters that didn't work:
- Raising my hand and waiting for students to do the same: Perhaps I didn't allow for enough time, but I found when students were engaged on the screen and not on you, raising hand and waiting for them to respond was not effective. (Awkward moments)
- Lack of Attention Getters: (Speaking the direction over the students without gathering their attention) At one point during the lesson when students were discussing, I tried to provide additional instruction without getting their attention resulted in not only having to repeat my instructions, I also spoke over and cut off student's discussion.
Next Lesson
Given the time constraint, there was only so much I could had covered. If there's a subsequent lesson, I feel it would be of value to address these two following items:
- Explore how technology can be used to aid differentiated learning and address different learning styles: One topic I did not address in my lesson is how technology can be used to encourage differentiated learning and address different learning styles such as ESL, Learning disabilities and visual spatial, audio, kinesthetic respectively. In a subsequent lesson, I might assign different situations for students with different needs and learning styles and have the class identify resources to help these students. I might also bring in some examples for the class experiment with.
- Discuss limitations and suitable situations to integrate technology: Technology play a key role in the 21st century classroom, but it may not always be effective to promote learning. Student's role is to learn and teacher's role is to guide, technology is meant to be vehicle to aid learning and teaching. Technology should not be the focus of teaching. I think it would be valuable to examine how much technology integration, what kind of technology integration is effective in the classroom.
microteaching_lesson_plan.doc |
Activity #1: PollEverywhere
Activity #2: Google Form
Google Spreadsheet Results
Activity #3:Padlet