For our lesson for Dr. Luongo's teaching language arts class, Leigha and I took a number of different steps to prepare for our lesson. First we recorded then rerecorded our podcast, we created a lesson plan, then individually prepared for the lesson. The objectives for our lesson included: students will be able to recall characters names and hobbies, and students will be able to create their own encounter with Oscar using their favorite activity and the story paper worksheet. We chose these objectives as introductory activities to this book based on the grade level that we chose (grade 1). Our assessments for this lesson coordinated with the objectives, to assess the first objective, we made a worksheet for the students where they chose the characters name and drew a line to the picture that went along with the name. To assess the students work, we created a smiley face rubric that was based on the completion of the worksheet. The second objective was assessed using a check, check minus, check plus rubric, also graded upon its completion.
Our lesson plan, when put into effect in the classroom, wasn't executed exactly as we had planned or as it was written, but thankfully we did get through everything we had planned to do by the end of the lesson. The most important thing we tried to teach our students during this lesson was the importance of what it takes to be a good friend. Overall, I think the lesson went well, and if we had a classroom of first graders rather than college students, the students would have been much more excited and interseted in the activities we did in this lesson. The only thing that I would have done differently in this lesson, would have been to enstill more dicipline in the classroom since some of the students went off topic and were starting to get a bit out of hand. To make this lesson more effective, I would have inforced our classroom rules and our classroom rule song more.
I think that there is always room for improvement, but the only thing that I would have done differently in comparison to this particular lesson, would have been to try to integrate using the smartboard in our lesson. The one piece of technology I really thought worked well was the use of our podcast in the lesson. Leigha and I planned to use the podcast as the reading to the book we chose and we created a powerpoint show of the pictures to go along with the podcast reading. By doing this we were able to have the students listen to the podcast and were also able to allow all of the students to see the illustrations. We did finally decide to use both the podcast and the powerpoint in our lesson and I personally think it went well!
The students were really well behaved during the podcast and powerpoint show and seemed to thoroughly enjoy both. I thought it went well because the students were paying attention and took the characters, story, plot, etc. away from the reading. I don't know if there could have been a better way to infuse the podcast into the lesson more effectively, however if I did choose to use this in my classroom, I would probably make copies of this on cd for students to listen to as they needed.
In conclusion, I hope to use podcasting in my future classroom and eventually (depending on the grade level I teach) teach my students to podcast on their own.
