Lesson Plan Reflection
For my lesson, I chose to integrate technology by teaching a lesson on stories. More specifically, students would learn the three main parts of a story, beginning, middle and end, and then use a comic generator as a way of publishing their piece. Because I did not have access to students, I taught the lesson to an adult. I used more technical language, such as climax and resolution, and required him to create a lengthier piece than I would expect an elementary student to produce. The lesson would first require the student to think of a personal story from their life, identify the beginning, middle and end and then put this story into a comic format using a generator.
The adult is also a college graduate who has had sufficient practice writing stories and using technology. The student was genuinely excited to choose a story and took a while to decide on an idea once we started brainstorming possible topics. Once the student chose a story, we identified the beginning, climax and resolution while editing the story to ensure the parts of a story were apparent.
When we looked at the writing later, the student wanted to change a few things about the story to make it more interesting. After this revision period, we viewed a model comic I had made online. The student explored the site and enjoyed manipulating the comic screens and choosing different characters to represent the characters in his story. Exploring eventually became a distraction and I prompted him to decide on a final “theme” for the comic and begin writing his comic. We worked on using a storyboard in order to help him organize his dialogue and images. This visual was especially helpful for him and allowed him to create a coherent comic that aligned closely with the story he had written.
The final day, the student edited the comic completely on his own. He was able to independently organize his information and tweak his images so they complimented the actions and dialogue in each screen of the comic. Upon completion, the student presented the comic to me.
Reflecting back on the lesson has helped me realize that this lesson would be more appropriately a unit for younger children. Younger students would require much more scaffolding and modeling of the writing then the adult required. The students I will have this year come from low socio-economic homes and most do not own a personal computer. Their technological fluency will be limited. While writing the lesson, I knew that I would be teaching an adult who does not have these limitations. While I first assumed it would be easy to put a story in a comic format, it quickly became apparent that the style of a comic requires a much different kind of writing than narrative writing. Now that I have taught the lesson to him, it helps me visualize how much longer this lesson may take for my future students.
The beginning of the lesson required teacher modeling and teacher directed learning in order to teach the student the expectations for the lesson. Once expectations were established, I began pulling back and allowing the student to take more control over the lesson. On the final day, I pulled back completely and allowed the student to do the exploring. This is evidence of both the behaviorist theory where the teacher is the transmitter of knowledge and the student the recipient and the cognitive constructivist theory where students learn from “doing.” Both theories are important aspects of teaching because both theories offer advantages. In order to guide students through a task, we must first teach and guide their thinking. Once expectations are established, students will learn from and engage in a task that is student centered much more than continuing to act as passive learners.
While I at first thought the technology would provide only advantages to the lesson, I began to realize some disadvantages to using the comic generator. One disadvantage is the added time spent teaching the format of a comic and what typical comics look and sound like. Second, writing a story and then transferring it into this format is somewhat difficult and the two formats didn’t come together as easily as I had originally planned. For younger students, this will be even more challenging since these students require specific expectations and modeling of an activity in order to be successful.
