This week in my CEP 810 class we were asked to create a 21st century lesson plan, incorporating at least one digital technology and the ideas of Douglas Thomas, John Seely Brown, and Rene Hobbs. For students to thrive in their learning environments they need to generate content that represents their learning, paraphrasing from Thomas & Brown (2011). Hobbs (2011) furthers this idea by explaining one of her fundamental literacy strategies is to create with confidence in self expression and an awareness of the audience. With these two ideas in mind, and the fact that my students are about to complete a chapter on exponential functions, I designed a lesson plan for students to create their own review of the chapter.
This activity and review will take two days. On the first day, students will go through the chapter and highlight all of the important concepts, vocabulary, and skills. Once accumulated on the Smartboard, students will be broken into 6 groups, one for each section of the chapter. Each group will then go through and create questions for the ideas that we already highlighted as important. Creating the quiz questions should take the whole first day. After school, I’ll take the questions and input them into the Smart Responder software. Then next day students will take the review quiz. Students generally are more into the review if it is a game or competitive in some way, so there will likely be a bonus point on the line. We will go through the questions and students will use the Smart Responders to give their answers. During this time, I’ll keep track of what questions/concepts students most struggled with. In the second half of the class, we’ll review the most problematic areas. For the full lesson plan click here.
This review should be fun because it’s always interesting to see the questions students create and how important class competitions can be. I also think that relying on the Responder to tell me how many students got questions correct will be a great benefit. This way I don’t need to rely on hesitant student responses and can be confident I’m targeting the areas that need it most.
Hobbs, R. (2011). Digital and media literacy: Connecting culture and classroom. Thousand, Oaks, CA: Corwin/Sage.
Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, Ky: CreateSpace?.
Educational Technology 