Presentations and Reflections

My PowerPoint presentation is designed to introduce the Watersheds Unit to a fifth grade class. Click here to view a web version of the presentation in a new window. (This only seems to look right inInternet Explorer 6).

Reflections:

This was my first experience designing a curriculum until at all, and I think it is going to be a huge help to me that this first experience used the Teaching for Understanding Framework. As I go on to create curriculum for this school year, I think my starting place will be very different because of my experiences in this course. My natural tendency would have been to start with concrete activity plans and then try to connect them to the larger picture afterwards. By learning to look first at the end – the desired result of a unit – I think my starting place in curriculum design will be very different.

I was initially very hesitant about taking this course at this point in my career – with no teaching or curriculum experience at all. Looking ahead to teaching for the first time this fall, I think I am in a much better place to start the year than I would have been otherwise.

Although these are all tools I’ve used before, either at work or in other courses, I thought the bigger picture of how they were used here was especially helpful to me. I think the way we used many of these resources (especially Inspiration) as a step on our way to a final product will be useful to me both in curriculum design and in thinking about how I want to ask students to tackle a large project.

I also found my experience with online collaboration in the earthquake project very useful. Remembering that I can work with educators beyond my school is going to be very important for me, I think.

Of the ISTE teacher standards, I think the one that stands out the most for me, is II-D: “plan for the management of technology resources within the context of learning activities.” This course and the curriculum project in particular, has helped me think more about that balance, and about seeing my teaching of technology through the lens of subject matter curriculums in the regular classrooms of my students. It is easy to start thinking about teaching technology for its own sake, rather than as a tool which enhances learning in the other subject areas, and I think this class has helped me look at ways of teaching all the technology concepts I want to cover while staying in the larger curricular framework.

Although this was not my first time creating content for the web, it was the first time I had used the website as a portfolio, keeping track of steps towards a goal. I think it is interesting to go back and see the revision process that I went through in refining my ideas about this curriculum. I really like the web as a medium for this kind of project, especially because it was so helpful to see what everyone else was doing along the way.