Educators consider technology as a great tool to design their classroom curriculum. Every educator creates a lesson plan which shows a detailed description of the course of instruction for one class. Creating a lesson plan is easy as well as effective if we use technology to do so. We’ve had many interactions with educators about their ways of creating digital lesson plans and their implementation in the classroom. The following are a few exclusive important guidelines from expert educators.
Chris Clementi’s approach to provide students with a rich curriculum:
Google sites is a great tool for educators to integrate technology into the classroom. It brings together all of the other great Google services which allow users to embed Google Docs, Calendar, YouTube, Picasa albums and much more. Chris Clementy, Design Tech Teacher in Academy District 20, has shared her practices of using Google sites in the classroom. Ms. Clementy uses this platform for many purposes such as creating her classroom’s ideal website to provide her students with meaningful and rich curriculum in the form of images, videos and tutorials, exhibit her students’ works and collaborate with students and other teachers.
Lesson Creation with Camtasia:
Chris Clementy uses Camtasia software to create video lessons for her students. This software enables users to record their screens to capture PowerPoint slides, software demos, web pages, and more. You can also import camera video, music, photos, and more to truly customize your screen recordings for effective lesson creation.
As you explore her classroom site, you will see the great opportunities that her students have to learn creative ways of using technology for various purposes.
The showcase in Clementi’s portfolio shows you how effectively an educator can create digital lesson plans.
Lesson planning tools recommended by Hira:
Hira Prasad , Asst. Headmistress at Birla High School has suggested some great tech tools that help educators in creating digital lesson plans. She has stated that these tools are user friendly and act as a platform for your students as well as your overseas partners. Let’s learn about a few important digital lesson planning tools that are recommended by Hira.
Capzles:
Capzles enables its users to create rich multimedia experiences with videos, photos, music, blogs and documents.
Prezi:
Prezi is one of the cloud-based presentation apps and a presentation tool that helps users organize and share their ideas. It is also a virtual whiteboard that transforms presentations from monologues into conversations: enabling people to see, understand, and remember ideas.
Wordle:
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from texts that you provide. The clouds gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Educators can tweak their clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes in order to engage students with effective lesson presentations. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. Educators can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with their students.
Mentor Mob:
MentorMob ‘s online learning platform allows anyone with a passion for what they do to curate websites, videos, blogs, and more into Learning Playlists. So, instead of searching alone, people from all around the world can work together to show off what they know and learn from each other. Educators and students can create a learning playlist and share high quality resources for a specific concept.
Karen Berlin’s approach:
Karen Berlin , an edtech enthusiasist, combines multiple technology tools to deliver highly effective lessons to her students.
“I make my own videos because I want my students to hear my voice & I can make the lesson more personal, bring in things from school”, says Karen.
When asked about the type of tools she uses in her classroom to create and share her digital lessons, she said, “I use Explain Everything on my iPad to make videos, upload to my YouTube channel then post links on our Edmodo class page”.
The above mentioned are the few strategies, tools and tips suggested by expert educators. We’d like to have your views as well. Please feel free to share with us your practices of creating digital lesson plans and your ways of using them. The comment box awaits you.
