Clarity is everything.
When planning any lesson whether it is reading instruction or technology instruction, it is essential to know and understand what it is you want your learners to master. Clark breaks down the important components to ensure that this clarity of purpose takes place before beginning your lessons. Clark's Developing Technical Training lays out the process of building and creating effective lessons to support technical training. Moving from assessing need to implementation are a series of steps that looks closely at what skills and understanding is necessary for corporate and classroom success. Tying this together with Dervin's Sense Making and understanding how our students process information, empowers educators to create lessons that effectively deliver essential content to our students. It isn't enough for math teachers to understand how to add and subtract themselves, but rather they need to know the essential steps for completing these processes, and understand how the individuals they teach understand and process those steps. All of this is pushing us closer and closer to providing content that is not only pertinent to our students, but digestible and practical. The driving question I began with: What impact does learning a computer programing language (html/css) have on critical thinking skills, remains relevant to me and my students. As I continue forward building our technology design lab, I want to ensure that content I deliver is practical, accessible and relevant. As my students begin their journey through the digital landscape, it is important that I thoughtfully empower them to navigate this road in ways that are safe and useful. No learning exists within a vacuum nor is it disconnected from other subjects or content, so as I build lessons I must not only look closely at the content I am delivering but ways to connect to other areas of student learning. Need to Know: Which computer languages would be most useful to students? What activities are supported with these languages? How can computer programming become embedded with regular course content? How can I create cross-curricular connections? Audience: Teachers who use technology or hope to begin using technology. Update to driving question: Is teaching computer programing an appropriate use of educational time? OR Is Hour of Code a waste of time?
5 Comments
james
6/19/2017 07:29:37 pm
Jen,
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6/19/2017 11:40:52 pm
I like the idea of connecting HTML code and other areas. It came to me that maybe they could write a story and write code that would make a graphic that had an action. Maybe it's the art teacher writing. lol
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Dan
6/20/2017 09:02:53 pm
Practical, accessible and relevant! So true. I struggled as a student and school didn't feel like any of those things. With that goal students of all background and needs have a chance to be successful.
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Nai Saelee
6/21/2017 09:09:10 pm
Jen,
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Patrick
6/22/2017 09:01:38 am
I love what you said about math teachers needing to know more than just how to add and subtract and I think that is a great metaphor to sum up how Dervin's view on sensemaking applies to being a teacher. It reminds me of a video I saw in my credential program. A teacher was at some sort of government council meeting speaking out against some type of cuts to education or teachers. To prove her point, she brought in student work with errors in it. She asked them to identify the mistake, which some of them could do by pointing to the calculation error. None of them could point out why the student had made the mistake they did, what they might have been thinking, and how they would fix it. It really highlights something that I feel like we don't appreciate about ourselves as teachers, we have built up this skill of identifying the intent or purpose in mistakes.
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AuthorJen has been teaching school for awhile now. She's learned some stuff, but she's got tons more to learn. Archives
October 2017
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