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.

One final note: while you are finding resources for a single lesson, you want to offer the teacher a variety of strategies from which she can choose. You should also take into consideration different access plans (one computer, four computers in the classroom, computer lab, media center) since that will influence the strategies used. Feel free to imagine the "perfect" access, not necessarily the one you have in your actual school.

Let's get started...

Instruction:

1. View the science teacher's lesson. Make a few notes about the quality of the lesson in general.

Resources:

2. Begin by considering what resources your school already has that might help her. The Available Technology Inventory Worksheet from SEIRTEC may be helpful. This worksheet is part of the report Planning Into Practice: Resources for Planning, Implementing, and Integrating Instructional Technology, which is available online. In fact, I would recommend downloading the document right now. We'll be using several of their tools.

3. 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. Click here to view the Scope and Sequence Guide. Click here to view the Teacher Resource Guide. You might also want to visit the Division of Instruction's SOL page to see what other resources they have to offer. The Teaching Virginia SOL provides links for the fourth grade science SOL. As you explore, be sure to bookmark any websites you find that might be useful for your science teacher. If you still want to explore the web further, try Yahooligans. It is designed for kids so the sites you find will probably be appropriate for fourth graders. 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. While you're at Kathy's site (hosted by Discovery School) you might check to see if she's got anything that will help your science teacher.

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. She also gives you a copy of two forms from the SEIRTEC report: Software Selection and Software Evaluation that you can use to identify your needs and then evaluate the software you find. Your goal is to find at least two software programs that might be appropriate.

5. 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. You might also trying searching for a review of your title using a search engine like Google.

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? You can access the Word version of the lesson plan here that will allow you to edit the plan. For now, don't worry about how long the plan will take. (Remember, it was originally planned for one instructional period.) Include whatever strategies you think will best impact student learning as well as demonstrating the power of technology to support instruction. You can use the Classroom Activity Planning Template from SEIR-TEC to guide you as you develop your plan.

7. 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?