Stepping Out Of My Comfort Zone

Jonisa Deleon Guerrero

09/17/09

ED451-Audio Visual

Learning is a never ending process and lesson planning is one of the keys to becoming a well organized, successful teacher. We constantly learn new things everyday and I learned a great deal on creating a good lesson plan that is detailed and if other teachers would look at the lesson plan they would easily know what its about and know exactly what to do by following the objectives.

My experience working on my first lesson plan I decided to use the Model Digital-Age Work and Learning from the NETS*T Standards. I chose this particular standard because it best describes what I want my lesson plan to reflect on and my objectives for the students learning. The standard simply states that the teacher will “ (a) demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations, (b) collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation, (c) communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats, (d) model and facilitate effective use of current and emerging digital tools to locate, analyze, evaluate, and use information resources to support research and learning” (nets for teachers 2008).

We all learn new things every day and every time I create a lesson plan I always learn something new. Stating learning objectives are very important when creating a lesson plan and I learned to always make sure it reflects on the assignment and is detailed enough to understand. In addition, when creating a lesson plan I learned to always make sure that the lesson is at the students level of understanding as well as keeping the lesson fun and interesting. Also, to make sure that before beginning a lesson the students are introduced to the new tools that are going to be used in the lesson activity such as using Excel to create a graph and learning all the steps (Microsoft).

There are always the good and bad things in creating a lesson plan depending on the topic or activity. In the lesson plan I created I enjoyed refreshing my memory when gathering data and creating a graph. I took myself out of my comfort zone and added creating a graph on my lesson plan. On the other hand, I am not really good in math so gathering data and creating a graph or chart is not really something I find fun or exciting. Overall, I learned to step out of the box once in awhile and do things I don't normally do for the purpose of the students learning and broadening their minds in using technology and the many other different ways in gathering data as well as the variety of graphs that can be explored and used.

References:

* ISET (International Society for Technology in Education)-NETS for Teachers 2008

http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_for_Teachers_2008.htm

* Using graphs to investigate candy color distribution lesson plan [steps on creating a graph using word excel]

http://www.microsoft.com/education/candy.mspx