Lesson Plan

Good Morning,

I plan on starting to look at this more tomorrow. The lesson needs to be tied to a TEKS and I think our idea works best around some sort of reading related TEKS. It also has to target a specific set of students; my idea is that it be in the 4th - 7th grade range, but I'm not particular.
It also has to be tied to a Technology TEKS and I think that shouldn't be that difficult to find.

Since we're using Blogger for our assignment and the main idea is that this be generally an outside the classroom activity, but since our lesson plan must concern inside the classroom, then the lesson could be based on a beginning of the year I assignment in the Gradual release model. The teacher models it, the class does it together, then the goal would be for the students to be released to do this more on their own than inside the class as the academic year progresses.

Just my initial thoughts. I'll add more tomorrow.

Pre and Post Assessment ideas:
Since we are doing this assignment over some sort of reading and the students have to use the Blogger to interact, perhaps the Blogger could be used as homework before the in class part of the assignment and answer the questions in teams. So, we could teach a lesson on how to analyze a piece of writing around themes or motifs or grammar or whatever is done in the appropriate grade level, then the pre-assessment is centered on GENERIC questions about analyzing writing. This gives us as the teacher a level of measurement to see if the students understand the principles we are trying to teach. THEN, we teach the lesson related to our specific piece of writing, or the students read it and discuss it, the POST-Assessment is generally like the pre-assessment questions but related SPECIFICALLY to the assigned reading. 

It seems like the lesson plan would just cover one period of class time but maybe it should be a broader lesson plan covering a unit, piece of writing, etc. Having a pre-assessment, a post-assessment and teaching + technology interaction in one 45 minute (or whatever) block of instruction would be pretty difficult. 

That way the technology component is not the WHOLE thing, but just part of extending learning/interaction outside of the classroom lesson but that is integrated with it.

I'm reading Differentiating Instruction with Technology in Middle School Classrooms for my Literature Review; chapter 4 has great ideas to use technology for English/Language Arts