Friday, December 18, 2009

Lesson Plan templates

Nothing screws with a tech teacher worse than spending hours preparing a lesson just to have some element not work, either technical or curricular. Today I downloaded documents to help me plan my lessons for the rest of the school year ... so that I can squeeze in the curricular and extra-curricular lessons I want my students to learn! Microsoft Office's templates feature a number of lesson planning documents that will work just fine and I don't have to 'reinvent the wheel'. In order to download any of these you must use Internet Explorer:
  • Substitute Teacher Guide will come in handy to ensure my lesson schedule continues as I plan which professional development conferences I attend
  • Monthly Unit Planner for an overview of what you wish to accomplish each month
  • Weekly Planner so week to week you can adjust your monthly planner (personally I like to have a monthly overview then work on each lesson, so I have a binder with units and lesson-level sheets to accompany each unit)
  • Lesson Planner to plan details of each lesson
  • Lesson Planner to remind you to define concepts for younger tech students
Other templates are available at Microsoft Office's Template site (link to custom search for "lesson plan")

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Dell Pushes Advances of the Intelligent Classroom

Found this article while clearing my Inbox, yet a lot of the discussion still resonates in 2009 as schools struggle with reduced budgets.

I like the items mentioned in the "Checklist for Technology Planning" because if departments/schools/districts incorporate a good portion of these elements, they will achieve buy-in since all stakeholders will participate in the decision-making process, thereby reducing wasted money on tech that is not used. The checklist also emphasizes the Technology Plan which should document where a department/school/district currently stands regarding technology and where they'd like to be in a defined future time frame.

Most of their 2008 Top 10 Ed Tech stories are familiar, some are intuitive to educators forced to implement new classroom initiatives they had no input in developing, some are amusing. But they also remain issues in 2009 and going forward into 2010.