6th January 2016

Planning a lesson with technology

Post to your blog your thoughts about lesson planning with technology.  For those of you who have been teaching post your thoughts about what is the most difficult about planning a lesson and if there are any resources you might like to share.

Lesson planning with technology is essential.  It is also essential to have a back-up plan as technology has a tendency to fail at the most critical time. e.g. when you are being observed or during an assessment/exam.  I've seen technology fail at conferences in front of 1,000 people.  Whatever learning aim or objective you are using the technology for needs to be able to be adapted in the event that it doesn't behave the way it should.   For example, if the lesson is about composing emails and the system is down, have paper handouts prepared with key vocabulary and activities, matching, cloze etc.  Simmons & Hawkins (2009) discuss the importance of setting learning objectives that could incorporate a variety of activities, for example in an email lesson:
1.  Pupils know the key vocabulary
2.  Pupils know the relative advantages and disadvantages of email, 'snail mail', telephone and face-to-face communication.
3.  Pupils know how to send receive and attach
4.  Pupils know the potential dangers of email - contact with strangers, malware, phishing. (p. 58)

Teachers could design a variety of activities to achieve these objectives which don't necessarily involve using the technology directly.  A few years ago I used to use a text book called "Internet English", it was designed for adult ESL students and had a variety of activities around topics of interest.  Most of the activities were designed to be done collaboratively in pairs or groups, not on the computer, so it focused on constructivist strategies, of course there were "hands on" activities involving using search engines to locate information etc, a lot of those tasks I set students to do outside class for homework.  Unfortunately this publication went out of date very quickly and I'm not sure if a current version is still in print, if I find it I will post details on the Wiki.  I found it very useful at the time.

I always advise new teachers to arrive early and go to the classroom to check that everything is working properly well before the class is scheduled to begin, they should also store the phone number of technical support person in their phone.

Another huge time waster is when students' log ons / passwords don't work.  You can spend precious lesson time trying to help individual students log on or retrieve or reset a forgotten password.  I've had experience with this,  on occasions in the past I have logged in several students under my username and password just so we could get on with the lesson.   If possible have a list of students' usernames and passwords in the roll, of course there are privacy issues with this.  Where I work at TAFE I advise students to only use their TAFE username and password for TAFE work, they should use a different one for personal use. 

I was interested to read Simmons & Hawkins (2009) discussion about how the updated version of Bloom's Taxonomy (by Anderson & Krathwohl 2001) can be applied in the classroom incorporating technology.  Bloom believed that most learners could achieve provided they were given enough time and support (p. 58).  Simmons & Hawkins (2009) use the example of the email lesson using the taxonomy to set an appropriate level of challenge for the learning objective: "pupils know relative advantages and disadvantages of email, 'snail mail', telephone and face-to-face communication" (p. 59),  they then set out learning objectives to match every category on the taxonomy (figure 4.3 p. 60).  Not every student would achieve every level in every lesson, but over time most students could be expected progress through the levels.   Technology allows students to work independently in the classroom.  In language learning this is important as students need to time to learn at their own pace.

References:

Simmons, C., & Hawkins, C. (2009) Planning to teach an ICT lesson.  In Teaching ICT (pp. 54-105). London ; Sage Publications Ltd.