4a. Collaborate with educators to develop authentic, active learning experiences that foster student agency, deepen content mastery and allow students to demonstrate their competency.
4b. Help educators use digital tools to create effective assessments that provide timely feedback and support personalized learning.
4c. Collaborate with educators to design accessible and active digital learning environments that accommodate learner variability.
4d. Model the use of instructional design principles with educators to create effective digital learning environments.
The teachers appreciated the lesson because it showed them how they could use technology and have another adult “visit” their classroom without having to physically be there. After my lesson, the teachers designed more experiences using technology for their students including more guest speakers and storytellers and virtual field trips. The virtual field trips, in particular, helped teachers extend the learning outside of the walls of their campus.
This was the teacher’s response to the question; Do you think the lesson was a valuable learning experience for your students?
It was a great experience for the children. They were able to connect real-life knowledge with the book Tango Makes Three. Guided with the concepts that the class has been learning about. There were discussions regarding similarities and differences between their own families.
Collaborating with teachers and stepping into a classroom virtually for this lesson was a great experience. It was my first time delivering a lesson without actually being in the classroom and with the support of the in-person teachers it went smoothly. Designing the lesson alongside the classroom teachers to create an authentic, active learning experience that fosters student agency, deepens learning, and helps students demonstrate competency (4a) was very rewarding. Helping a classroom design a learning experience and active digital learning environment that could reach different types of learners (4c) beyond their four walls and empowering teachers to have more virtual guest speakers was another great outcome due to this experience.
4a. Collaborate with educators to develop authentic, active learning experiences that foster student agency, deepen content mastery and allow students to demonstrate their competency.
4c. Collaborate with educators to design accessible and active digital learning environments that accommodate learner variability.
This video artifact goes through my experience delivering a distance education lesson with a group of 4 and 5-year-old preschoolers, the Researcher class. The lesson plan is the accompanying designed plan with objectives, planned questions, pre and post ideas for the collaborating teachers. The Researchers were in-person at the preschool and I was shown on a big screen TV where they could see my video and I could share my screen with them and I could see them on my screen. The lesson was held live so that we could respond to each other. I read them the story, And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell and took them on a virtual field trip to the Central Park zoo where the story takes place.
To set up the lesson I had a meeting and email exchanges with the anchor teacher in the classroom and checked in on their technology set up, timing, and appropriate connections back to the class’ current curriculum (4a) which was, “Love makes a family.” I then developed the lesson and sent all the resources to the teaching team for their approval. I joined the Researcher classroom virtually during their circle time and delivered the story and then a virtual field trip. After the lesson, I had a follow-up meeting with the teachers on how it went and I provided them with a Google Form that took their students’ recall responses (4a).
The teachers recognized that they could use this type of virtual form to record responses from students in other situations for their documentation of learning. Specifically, it could be used if they were asking the same questions to their students individually and it would be a way to organize the answers based on each student. Since their students are not yet using computers themselves this would also be an opportunity to explain their device use to students and have them follow along as they recorded the students’ words. Teachers in this classroom would be able to collaborate more effectively using this technology since the data would be stored in one location that each teacher could easily access and use the data to support personalized learning (4b).
Teaching others to use a new virtual tool that could make their job easier is always rewarding. In this case, I showed how the Google Form can be used to quickly create an effective assessment that could help them gauge student learning, provide timely feedback, and therefore support individualized learning and assessment (4b).
4b. Help educators use digital tools to create effective assessments that provide timely feedback and support personalized learning.
As a follow up to the distance education lesson I delivered to the Researcher classroom (ages 4 & 5) above, I created and shared this google form. It was created so that the teachers could record responses from students on their experience of the lesson and record student comprehension of the story and virtual field trip.
The Google Form was shared with the anchor teacher of the Researcher classroom and offered as a place to record student responses either as a group or individually. I also followed up with the teaching team to explain how the Google Form works and what it could look like in other contexts.
I collaborated on this document with my co-facilitator to use as we thought about how to reach all the adult learners that would be in our PLC held virtually for the first time. The document was used to influence all nine of our sessions throughout the school year to create a trusting community in a virtual space and helped us to look at the pieces of assessment data we had to evaluate the learning that was taking place.
Using UDL principles and thinking about them before facilitating and designing each session in the PLC allowed us to create a virtual environment that was effective (4d) and enjoyable for all the adult learners that would be joining us. After going through the year of virtual meetings we had created the trusting community of learners that we had planned, evidenced by the final showcase the group collaborated to create (link to artifact 3.1). The rubric of what we would be implementing digitally (Google Forms, Jamboards) to assess the learning helped us to provide feedback and support personalized learning (4b).
Creating a trusting, effective community of learners virtually was a challenge that I and my co-facilitator knew we were facing. By creating this facilitator plan we were able to implement instructional design methods that would reach the diverse adult learners in our group and therefore create an effective digital learning environment (4d).
4b. Help educators use digital tools to create effective assessments that provide timely feedback and support personalized learning.
4d. Model the use of instructional design principles with educators to create effective digital learning environments.
This professional learning community (PLC) facilitator planning outline includes an overview, objectives and outline, evaluation rubric, and intentions. It was designed with universal design for learning (UDL) principles in mind and was created in collaboration with my co-facilitator for our PLC on inquiry and project-based learning during the 2020-2021 school year. The PLC was to be held virtually via Zoom for the first time due to the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying quarantine. The document also contains a rubric of what we would be looking at digitally (Google Forms, Jamboards) to assess the learning in order to provide feedback and support personalized learning.
It was very fun to collaborate with teachers and design a lesson plan that was delivered virtually to a preschool classroom. I was able to create a lesson plan in collaboration with the anchor teacher that related back to the ongoing classroom project making it an authentic, active learning experience that fostered student agency (4a). Through the questions woven throughout the lesson, and question prompts after the lesson, I modeled how to record students demonstrating their reading comprehension competency and focus on content mastery by linking to standards (4a). In delivering this lesson, I was able to collaborate with teachers to add another way the teachers could integrate technology into their classrooms. This continues to create an accessible and active digital learning environment that accommodates learner variability (4c). Working with the teachers before to get ideas on how to design the lesson so that it would best serve their classroom and then afterwards on use of virtual tools was also very rewarding.
When helping the teachers use the Google Form to record student reading comprehension, I showed how the Google Form can be used to quickly create an effective assessment that could help them gauge student learning, provide timely feedback, and therefore support individualized learning and assessment (4b). I will continue to work on building my knowledge around digital tools to support providing timely feedback and individualized learning assessment (4b).
Creating the facilitator planning outline allowed me and my co-facilitator to keep instructional design principles in mind that would create an effective digital learning environment inside of our PLC (4d). In our outline and in practice we were able to implement several ways of assessing our participants’ understanding of the content by using tools like Google Jamboard, Google Forms, and Padlet. Modeling this use of digital tools to create effective assessments for timely feedback and to support personalized learning (4b) for my co-facilitator helped us be more effective facilitators.
