Process

The Process

Working with a lesson plan provided by your fourth grade science teacher, your job is to suggest strategies and resources that use technology to support her instructional objective, which are, due to your superior instructional leadership, already carefully aligned with the Virginia SOL and the essential knowledge and skills.

Because your school did such a great job with this year's fundraiser, you have about $1000 to spend in support of this project. The science teacher has agreed that once she has field tested the lesson and been successful, she will provide in-service to the rest of the faculty about the experiment. Since she is a veteran teacher who has always been somewhat reluctant to embrace technology, you think her testimonial will help increase buy in among the rest of the faculty.

Let's get started...

Instruction:

View the science teacher's lesson. This plan is based on a typical lesson plan. You might want to save it or print it so you can take notes as you go along.

Resources:

1. Begin by considering what resources your school already has that might help her. The technology inventory worksheet might be helpful.

2. Your next stop should be the Virginia Department of Education's website to take a look at the Scope and Sequence and Teacher Resource Guides for fourth grade science. As you explore, be sure to bookmark any websites you find that might be useful for your science teacher. You might want to try using a "portal" where you can post your bookmarks to share with others. One popular site among educators is called PortaPortal. Once you set up an account, you can save your favorites here, get to them from any computer and share them with others. Click here to see the PortaPortal associated with this webquest. (Please note: for purposes of this webquest we are focussing on Science, but similar resources are available for the other three core areas.)

The Scope and Sequence Guide provides general information about the types of assignments and assessments that might be used. These are areas in which technology can be integrated.
The Teacher Resource Guide and Curriculum Framework provide information to the teacher about essential knowledge, skills and processes. Technology could be used to enhance student learning in these areas.
Finally, you should review the other resources offered at the Division of Instruction's SOL page to see what other resources they have to offer.

3. If you want to explore the web further, try Yahooligans, a search engine designed for younger students. In addition, you might try some of these other sites:

The Commonwealth of Knowledge, a collection of lesson plans, is available from James Madison University.
The Virginia Community of Learning offers access to peer-reviewed websites and resources.
Another good starting place is MarcoPolo, which offers links to standards-based, high quality educational resources.
Blue Web'n is an ever-growing library of "Blue Ribbon" learning sites on the web.
If your school or division has access to United Streaming, you could check there to see if any video resources are available.
Two education portals are always good starting points: Discovery School and Scholastic.

No matter where you find your sites, you'll need to evaluate the website for both accessibility and appropriateness. Kathy Schrock, famed Internet maven, offers more web evaluation tools than you will ever need.

4. With that $1000 burning a hole in your pocket, you decide to see what software might be available for purchase to support the lesson. Your media specialist suggests visiting CCV Software online since they have lots of software and offer excellent prices for K12 schools. Your goal is to find at least two software programs that might be appropriate. After finding several software titles that your school doesn't already own, you want to find out if anyone has reviewed these particular titles. SuperKids has a large database of software reviews.

5. Besides content-specific software, you might also consider the productivity software you probably already own. For instance, how could the teacher integrate a word processor, spreadsheet, database or multimedia slide show? Both Microsoft and Apple have websites just for educators where they show how their products can be integrated and offer lots of best practices. Finally, Inspiration is a graphic webbing program designed just for schools. they also offer integration ideas and templates for classroom use.

Integration:

6. Now it's time to help your teacher develop her instructional strategies. Often, when technology becomes a part of the plan, the instructional focus moves from being passive and teacher centered to more active and student centered. How can you utilize the resources you found to help your teacher achieve this goal as well as the goal of integrating technology? Include whatever strategies you think will best impact student learning as well as demonstrating the power of technology to support instruction.

7. You will also need to consider the hardware and software support the teacher will need to incorporate the strategies. Will she have to sign up for the computer lab? If she is showing a website to students, will she need a projector? If you decide to purchase software, how many licenses do you need? Who will install the software and maintain it if something goes wrong? Note: This can be the biggest barrier for teachers in integrating technology so be sure to spend some time considering what resources you have available for the teacher to access.

8. Of course, now that you've changed the strategies, you probably also want to think about a different kind of assessment. Often, this is the one area where teachers can easily find ways to incorporate technology. What ideas do you have for your fourth grade science teacher about how to integrate technology to help make the assessment authentic?

Click Evaluation to continue.