Planning for Lessons – Educational Technology

When Planning…

We need to determine what we ultimately want our students to know and be able to do.

Consider:

Students’ age and grade level
Prior knowledge or life experiences of your students
Skills you want your students to acquire
- Identify specific things students should accomplish during a lesson or unit and how this relates to what they need to accomplish over the course of a semester or school year
Instructional goals (long-term outcomes of instruction)
Instructional objectives (specific outcomes of a lesson)

Aligning goals with standards:

Content area standards
- general statements regarding knowledge and skills that students should acquire at various grade levels
- characteristics their accomplishments should reflect

Technology that Aids Planning

ReadWriteThink
- The National Council of Teachers of English’s (NCTE) provides educators with access to high-quality lessons in reading and language arts instruction by offering the very best in free materials.
- For each lesson, you can see the Common Core and NCTE standards addressed, as well as how long the lesson takes to implement. Every assignment is broken into a “theory to practice” rationale with a resources and preparation section, an instructional plan, and a link to related resources.
PhET

For science, math, engineering, and technology, teachers can use PhET. PhET creates very accessible free interactive math and science simulations that are based on extensive research. These simulations engage students through an intuitive, gamelike environment so they can have fun learning through exploration and discovery.

Scholastic offers lots of resources for teachers that are all linked to relevant standards, and built around holidays and current events.
Additionally, the site features planning guides, graphic organizers, interactive computer lab and whiteboard activities, book lists, listen-and-read activities, writing activities, vocabulary lists, and discussion guides for most books students would read in grades K-8.

Epic! allows teachers and librarians to instantly access 25,000 e-books, learning videos, quizzes, and more. It also includes books written in Spanish!

National Geographic provides free lessons designed in a modular system: activities, lessons, and units. Most activities can be completed in a class period, and a full lesson can take up to a week of class time. A unit can take a bit longer. The goal of these resources is to enable students to become geographically informed through the mastery of factual knowledge, mental maps, and critical thinking.