Group Teaching
This is one of the long-term group projects in which students reflect on their own instructional technology skills and improve and develop their own instructional technology styles.
Many instructional technology instructors find it difficult to help undergraduate pre-service teachers see enough relevance in learning various instructional technology skills as students lack adequate teaching experience and many students have not been exposed to lessons enhanced with instructional technology. This project serves as a wake up call for those students to set their baselines, where they are now, and in which directions they need to go.
Procedures
The whole learning process is summarized in the picture below (Figure 1).
① Pre-Teaching
At the beginning of the semester, each group creates a short lesson plan and teaches a topic in their subject area to the whole class. At this point, students have not been exposed to my instructional technology lessons yet, but must do their best to teach the topic. Their classroom instructions are recorded on video for a later analysis and evaluation.
Their lesson plan and classroom instruction are evaluated by using the same grading rubrics designed for the post-teaching, but they receive complete/incomplete grades. Most groups may be shocked to see their scores on the rubrics, so I must help them understand that it is only normal and that there is much to learn for the next few weeks.
② Instructional Technology Lessons
Students begin exploring a series of instructional technology concepts, principles, tools, and strategies through my lessons and the small projects and assignments in the course.
③ Revise Lesson Plan
Each group analyzes and revises their initial lesson plan and classroom instruction. As part of their analysis process, each group uses VideoAnt to watch and critique the classroom instruction they gave at the beginning of the semester. The VideoAnt analysis is graded, and the revised lesson plan is also graded for its quality.
Each group must incorporate instructional technology tools, techniques and strategies in their revised lesson plan and instruction to the best of their knowledge and skills.
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④ Post-Teaching
Each group teaches the same topic with the revised and improved lesson plan to the whole class. This session is also recorded on video. A short classroom discussion follows each group teaching session to reflect on some aspects of the improved instruction. This stage is graded for the quality of their instructional technology integration.
⑤ Report Entire Process
Each group compares their pre- and post-teachings and creates a multimodal report on how (in what ways, how much, and why) their lesson plan and instruction were improved. The report must be created by using a website or blog.
Grading & Rubrics
Coming soon.