My Blog

http://jjblandin.podomatic.com/entry/2011-10-29T12_25_13-07_00

I tried to embed my podcast but for some reason it just is not working, so here is the link to my podcast. Thanks and enjoy!!

My Blog

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The Classroom of the Future!! (Technology lesson plan)

For my lesson I will be covering World War II and all important factors that led to the outcome we know of today. The grade level I will be teaching will most likely be 10^th graders or sophomores in high school. The goal of this lesson is for the students to be able to recognize and understand all the main events that took place in World War II and be able to understand why and what outcome came from the main events. My lesson will include a power point presentation, use of the World Wide Web, and some kind of tablet.

To start my lesson I will start out by asking all the students what kind of background they have with World War II. After that I will then play some old radio broadcasts from that era. After having a general discussion on the radio segments I will then show a power point presentation covering all the basic essentials a class needs to know about World War II. The power point will include sound bites and videos from that time period.  After the power point I will get to the main assignment of the actual lesson which will involve the use of the internet and a tablet of some kind. This is where we come to the scenario in my lesson.

In the beginning of the year I divided my class up into groups of four and I had the group’s name themselves. These groups were to be used throughout the rest of the year. To start I will first divide all of my students into their groups.  I will pull out a hat which has a bunch of folded up pieces of paper in it which has events from World War II written on them. The students will then pick one team leader to come up and draw from the hat. After the groups have found out what their main topic are they then will then use the internet and begin researching on whatever event they pulled out from the hat. I will give them some guidelines to researching there topic. They will need to find out when it happened, where it happened, which people played an important key role in this event, important vocabulary from this event and a brief outline of what it is or what happened. After this the students will begin using their blog’s.

In the beginning of the year when I had all the students put into groups and name themselves I then had the groups create their own group blog. For this assignment after the students are finished researching there topic they will then go record all of their findings on their blog. Students enjoy blogging because the blog is something they have created and anybody can view them. Once all students have finished recording all of their findings into their blog’s I will then create a class wiki and this is where all the groups will then mold and form our class wiki into a legitimate World War II wiki page.  This is where I will go look at the blog pages and class wiki and give out a grade on accuracy and actual amount of work done. This is how student learning will be assessed. 

I am able to do large scale lessons like this because the school I am teaching at has supplied a tablet for every student in my class. By doing this it opens the doors to a million different ways to teach a lesson.  That is the glory of using technology in the classroom not only does it help boost the interest of students in your class but it also makes the job of teaching a little easier. Instead of taking home millions of worksheets and papers you now just have to log onto your computer and with a few clicks of the mouse the grading is finished. 

Tpac

 Alright let’s be honest here for us up and coming teachers who are still young we know all there is to know about technology we understand why students today don’t work as hard as they used to this is where technology comes into play. Technology is basically the heart and soul to young minds, it’s the battery that keeps education running and sooner or later without it you will be left behind. How many people nowadays would rather go read a book on Sir Patrick Henry instead of just going online and watching a whole entire documentary on him on the history channel? I understand that it is probably hard to just quickly integrate technology into today’s schools and it is also probably extremely expensive but I truly believe if you gave each student his or her own laptop or Ipad you would see a huge difference in class participation. Could you imagine trying to talk about a certain city and then just telling your students to go to the Ipad and open Google Earth to see the actual city that is being talked about. Today it comes down to visual learning, text books are slowly becoming a thing of the past. It’s all about seeing it now and not just reading and hearing about it. Not only will technology be good for students but it will also make our jobs a hell of a lot easier and if you ask me I would much rather have easy than hard.  

Cheers.