My Technology Lesson Plan & Supplemental Materials

For my final project in Educational Technology, I designed a standards-based, 9th grade English Language Arts lesson called "Finding Your Fairytale." I'll include the complete plan and some supplementary materials in this post. 

Lesson Plan

This lesson applies the knowledge students learned about fairy tales into an online, interactive project. Students will analyze how fairy tales change over time and through different mediums by exploring the website, Finding Your Fairytale. They will evaluate which fairy tale characters resonate with them and why, will create an online profile on which they upload an avatar of themselves in character-appropriate costume that puts their own spin on the character, and will write about connections between the character's story and their own life. Finally, the class will review each other's work and will review each other's work and leave affirmative comments. 

The purpose of this project is for students to see themselves in the cultural stories that resonate with them. They will consider how fairy tales teach problem-solving, resilience, courage, and independence, and are not just about the "happily ever after." They will connect their lives to a fairy tale that matters to them and reflect on how the tale teaches a life skill that they struggle with or have recently learned. Finally, this project teaches empathy and community-building by asking students to share their profiles with the class and respond to each other's projects in writing with compassion and humor.

EDUC2220-LessonPlan-MarlaineBrowning by Anonymous tOLHHCbnR2 on Scribd

Supplemental Materials

My 3-part "Finding Your Fairytale: My So-Called Fairytale Life" project prompts: 

Finding Your Fairytale, Part 1: Website Analysis
Finding Your Fairytale, Part 2: Create a Profile for My So-Called Fairytale Life
Finding Your Fairytale, Part 3: Share & Respond to Classmate's Profiles

My pre-assessment review game and quiz:
KAHOOT! REVIEW GAME: "Once Upon a Time: Fairytale History"
QUIZ: "Once Upon a Time: Fairytale History"

One sample journal prompt from SeeSaw:
SEESAW JOURNAL ENTRY: "Pixar's Boundin' & Fairytales"

I'm including the 3-part project prompts because these are the core of the lesson. I was originally inspired to design this lesson based on the incredible work done by Angie Kupper to create the site Finding Your Fairytale. The purpose of this site is for adults to see themselves in story, and to create a map for themselves to overcome a particular life challenge. The site has garnered lots of well-deserved attention and I hope others continue to peruse its magical pages. For me, I wanted to bring a project like this to kids, and make it something that connects mental health, story, and community-building.

My Kahoot! game is a fun way to review fairy tale history using one of my favorite ed tech apps. It's a great way to engage kids in teams using technology. But it's also just a wonderful old-fashioned way to teach them content! Sure, students come for the game element, but they stay for the learning. Or rather, the learning stays with them. I follow the game with an online quiz using Google Forms which automatically curates and grades this low-stakes assessment. Sure, I will review the answers for partial credit or misspellings, but it's also nice to give students feedback and not grade All The Things when my time can be better spent in other ways.

Finally, I recently discovered SeeSaw in an Adolescent Literature class. It's a good resource for journal entries and activities. Student responses can be shared with the class on a "whiteboard" space, or kept private so only the teacher sees it. The mechanics are a little clunky, but it works for now and I'm willing to use it until I find another product I prefer.

Overall, this lesson is a personal project combining many of my loves -- fairy tales, writing, empowering student voices, creativity, and building self-efficacy. I hope you enjoy!

Reflections on My Future Tech-rich Classroom

This week, my Educational Technology assignment is to reflect on some question prompts and respond here. This is a great way to put together what I've learned this semester and consider how I might apply it in the future.

How do I envision a technology-rich classroom?

I envision a blended classroom. While my priority is in-person learning for the plethora of social skills we can learn from each other, I imagine using technology every day in and out of the classroom. As a future English-Language Arts (ELA) teacher, my priority is teaching reading, writing, communication, and language-oriented critical thinking skills.

While literature is a big part of ELA, I can also teach it through many tech-rich mediums such as audiobooks, films, apps, and website research. I intend to incorporate technology in presentation tools such as Google Slides or Prezi; reading tools for differentiated learners; collaborative tools such as book groups with other schools using video chats; gaming and testing systems like Kahoots or Quizlet; and virtual reality tools like Google Expedition.


What age group will I teach and what unique issues will this age range face regarding integrating technology in their education? 

When I graduate, I will be qualified to teach grades 7-12 ELA. I'm most interested in public or free laboratory schools as this was my school experience. One benefit to teaching adolescents is that they typically have their first phone or tablet and are very socially-oriented, so there are many options available to teachers who want to maximize the technology experience.

Some of the challenges would involve keeping students on task and dealing with budgeting issues in the school system or personal lives of my students. I do not assume that every student has regular access to WiFi or a personal device to use outside the classroom.

To offset these challenges, I imagine assigning specific roles to each student for group work or other social experiences. I will also try to not assign homework that requires technology unless I'm sure every student has consistent access to the tech tools they would need.

What technology have I learned about that I believe enhances learning? What tech am I still wary of? What excites me and frustrates me about the technology?

While I use technology every day for my education and personal use, I still believe there are some limitations. Access is always an issue, and I want to keep this in mind when choosing tech for my classroom. Also, I haven't yet seen technology that masterfully walks students to the highest learning levels of Bloom's technology. I don't expect tech to do this -- after all, this is what I'm trained for -- but as a tool it's important to realize that technology doesn't replace the teacher or classroom experience for the highest order thinking skills.

I suppose I should say tech doesn't replace the teacher YET, but honestly I don't believe tech will fully replace human relationships in education. The more we learn about human development and psychology, the more we realize about the complex interactions happening between people on a subconscious or micro-level, and I see this as valuable for our development, even as artificial intelligence and virtual reality become increasingly sophisticated.

I will end with what excites me about technology, which is just about everything! Technology is an excellent tool for enhancing student engagement, motivation, the elaboration of learning, deepening understanding, and to explore parts of the world inaccessible to students given the reality of field-trip budgets. Technology builds bridges across disciplines and allows students to work on group projects asynchronously. I'm especially excited about developments in cloud computing, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the varied options for differentiated learning. I look forward to my teaching adventures with technology!

Classroom Design

This week's task asks us to use Classroom Architect to design a technology-rich classroom in our subject area. For my design, I focused on design principles recommended by the article, "Four Key Elements of 21st Century Classroom Design" that we read for class.

First, I want flexibility in my classroom. Therefore, I focused on moveable workstation tables. I imagine every day utilizing the whiteboard and media screen (with ceiling-attached projector) and small group work. To meet this need, I organized the tables and seating so every student can easily see the screen and are already in small groups. Students will work on laptops/tablets at their tables so there's no need for additional computer stations. When we have a Socratic Seminar or a large-group conversation we can move the tables into a central "conference table" configuration. Or, if all students should be facing forward for an extended length of time, such as if they are watching a film, we can push tables into two long rows facing the screen.

Another quality of 21st century classroom design is furniture designed for differentiated needs. The white squares represent chairs but an exercise ball, wheelchair, or other seating option could just as easily replace a few traditional chairs. I also added two beanbag chairs in case students want to have a different seating option under the window. Moreover, student tables are more functional than rigid, individual desk-chair combinations. As a lefty, I always hated the right-oriented desks and always had to fight the other left-handed students for the single left-oriented desk or drag a second right-oriented desk up to my left side. Now we acknowledge so much additional student learning needs and should accommodate these needs in classroom design.

Technology integration and flexibility is essential. Tech in the classroom is here to stay, but the delivery method changes every decade. While computer stations were cutting edge 20 years ago, now most students have laptops or tablets and there's no need to leave space for bulky desktop stations. I already mentioned I imagine using a projector and screen and want to leave room for this. However, I want the screen to double as my whiteboard or smartboard.

Finally, a 21st century classroom should be light-filled. Many schools have a wall of windows built in to their design but it's not in every classroom. I designed a classroom with windows for natural light and put my desk, beanbag chairs, and a student table near the window for this benefit. Why put my desk under the window? Why not put a second student table? Because I'm highly responsive to natural sunlight and need to "recharge" at different times during the day when I'm not teaching. If I'm at my best in terms of mental health, then I can be my best self as a teacher. For classrooms that don't have much (or any) natural lighting, schools are utilizing more natural-ish lighting with lamps versus the harsh overhead fluorescents.


Overall, the key principle in my classroom design is flexibility. I want to have the ability to change as new research about student learning needs changes.

QR Code

This week's Ed Tech focus is to learn about QR codes. The assignment is to create and embed a QR code for my blog here in this post. On my blog. Yes, it's redundant but it's practice! So, here's my blog QR code that I generated from the site goqr.me.

Tech Tool Review

Pinterest for the Classroom

This week's Ed Tech assignment was to collect helpful teaching tips in Pinterest and embed these boards here in the blog. I've been using Pinterest for several years and have even been collecting education-related content on Pinterest. However, it helped to divide my generic "Teaching" board into three specific boards: "My Content Area: ELA," "My Classroom: Classroom Management," and "Student Activities." The biggest challenge was figuring out how to embed these boards in this blog.

Pinterest is an essential tool for me as a teacher. It helps me visually organize content articles, activities, and graphic organizer worksheets into one place. I often search for key terms that I've recently learned in my licensure classes and find a deeper understanding of the concepts by reading several short articles in one sitting and then applying it by exploring lesson plan ideas. I could also see my students using Pinterest as a visual organizing tool.

The strengths of this program are in curating content into visually pleasing "boards" or folders. I like scrolling through pictures that other people have "pinned." I'm drawn in to an interesting image rather than always going for the text-based title of an article. I also collect many pins for personal home projects and am inspired by the images alone.

The challenges of Pinterest used to be that I couldn't create subfolders. However, I just noticed today that I can add a subcategory to my pin, so perhaps that's changed. Also, it's difficult to find the most recent information about a topic. Instead, when I search for a keyword I may have to scroll through a lot of material I've already seen. I haven't played around too much with the settings but I'm wondering if there's a way to change that algorithm.

Overall, I love Pinterest and plan to keep using it for personal and professional boards. I find it as visually appealing as Instagram but easier to save and curate ideas I want to return to. It feels like a Google search with images, and I love that I can focus on what I want to search for in the moment. Pinterest is an excellent teaching tool and I plan to use it for my classroom.

In case you are interested in the teaching boards I made for this assignment, I've embedded them in a gadget on my blog home page. Happy pinning!

Khan/Koller Review

This week's Educational Technology assignment asked us to explore two companies offering free online classes -- Coursera and the Khan Academy -- and review the material for possible use in our classroom or for our personal lives.

First, a basic impression of what I noticed on the Khan Academy's site. The classes are easily organized into broad categories such as: Math, Science & Engineering, Computing, Test Prep, etc. There's a small section of Arts & Humanities but there are no literature or writing classes and only one class on grammar which is a very general overview that seemed geared toward older rather than young kids. I participated in an Art history class titled "Art of the Islamic World." I also scrolled through a few other options relating to history, government, or math. The videos and assessments were easy but interesting.

As an ELA teacher, I doubt I will ask my students to take a Khan Academy class unless we are reading a book that might benefit from the added context of history or government. While, of course, much of my work is interdisciplinary and does benefit from cultural context, there are other online options (Google Expeditions, for example) that I would turn to before the Khan Academy.

Moreover, for my students, including English language learners, I would prefer more classes about writing. Grammar is okay but is considered a lower-order concern. What benefits my students is learning about different forms of writing, about argument, about different audiences, about accurately summarizing other people's ideas before responding with one's own, and about knowing the purpose for writing in the first place (i.e. sometimes called the "so what?" question).

Finally, I'm still considering Khan's philosophy behind the Academy and his comments in an interview we watched in which he notes a discrepancy between the "product" parents believe they are buying their children when they send them to college (i.e. a highly respected credential that will have a return on investment in the job market) versus what college administrations believe they are selling (a content-rich, mastery-based, experiential growth opportunity that teaches the whole person as much about being a 'good' citizen as about practical content knowledge). He argues that this discrepancy can be corrected by more online credentialing.

I tend to disagree because to me, with the bias of an educator, I don't see the educational trend toward better credentialing as true progress. I'm concerned that even offering "certificates" or other credentials for completion of these free courses will not actually make a person competitive for a leadership role in a global market, but it will make them think they are competitive. What I see from students who go on to be global leaders is that they focus not on the acquisition of short-term credentialing but on the long-term cultivation of ontological skills. For me, a 21st century education involves daily practice of skills like creativity, collaboration, flexibility, resilience, problem-solving, and communication. I don't see this as the core mission of the Khan Academy.

On the other hand, Coursera offers free online classes in which learning is sustained over a longer time period. Their site is similar to Khan's in that there are a range of disciplines but an emphasis on STEM. Once again, no literature or writing classes. Therefore, like the Khan Academy, it may not be as useful for my ELA teaching as other resources.

Personally, my husband or I have taken a couple classes that took us several weeks to complete and we enjoyed the experience of these classes. I still remember some of the information I learned and I liked the interactive element. Something that Coursera does well is provide opportunities for deep learning. There are various formative assessments sprinkled throughout the lecture experience and the summative assessments move students up Bloom's Taxonomy.

As for whether MOOC's are the "wave of the future," I think they are the wave of a future for some people. I love that learning is free and designed by professional educators. I like that students who cannot attend traditional brick-and-mortar institutions for a variety of reasons have access to quality education.

Coursera also builds some of the 21st century skills that I believe are missing from the Khan Academy. As Daphne Koller mentions in her TED talk, students can organize in-person or digital study groups. Collaboration is encouraged.

I believe, like many, that when people put their heads together the ideas grow exponentially to the information at hand. We now know that the model of the "lone genius" is a myth. Many famous ideas from history were crafted from conversations in coffee houses or bars even though we still tend to only credit one person. Therefore, if MOOCs are going to be truly progressive, I believe that they need to be built with interactions in mind.

Koller notes that one thing Coursera, and many MOOCs, struggle with is higher-order learning. I agree. So much of my ELA teaching isn't about content but higher-order thinking. My assessments are designed around analysis, evaluation, and creating something new. I'm sure this is true in many fields.

So, for me, I want MOOCs to develop better ways to assess this higher-level or deep learning (the spatial geometry of education metaphors puzzles me -- is learning a fractal? Perhaps). The data that Koller and Ng are collecting from Coursera is incredibly useful, but I want to collect the hard-to-reach data that's qualitative, creative, and shows higher-order learning. I look forward to seeing how the research will evolve.