Introduction to “Implementing a Unit of Study that Leverages the Use of Technology.”

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for this introduction to implementing a unit of study that leverages the use of technology. By the end of today's tutorial, we will have previewed what the learning objectives are for this unit, how these learning objectives are connected, and why these learning objectives matter.

We have four main learning objectives for the unit. And the first one is that we want to analyze personalized instruction and differentiated instructional strategies. And we want to look at how they connect to the objectives that we develop for our units of study. We also are going to want to develop a unit of study that integrates technology, pedagogy, and content, and that also utilizes the theories, models, and frameworks presented through this course, specifically personalized learning and differentiated instruction.

We also want to deliver a unit of study using Sophia or a different LMS of your choice. And this is a means for students to access information, collaborate virtually, and create and publish their own work. And lastly, we're going to reflect on student feedback to our newly implemented unit of study. We're going to discuss, how will you improve or refine the unit of study based upon student feedback?

Let's look at each of these objectives more closely. When we're looking at personalization and differentiation strategies, we're going to do a lot with these. For starters, we're going to look at the five essential elements of personalized learning. And we're going to look at what personalized learning is like in a K through 12 classroom.

For differentiated instruction, we're going to do lessons where we look at what differentiated instruction is like when you're differentiating content, process, the product, and the environment. Remember, content is what you want your students to learn. It's your content area, like English or math. Process is how you deliver the content. Product is what the students produce to show mastery. And environment is the physical area in which you teach as well as the mentality of that classroom.

For developing a unit of study, we're going to look at how to use understanding by design to create a lesson that uses personalized learning and differentiated instruction. We're also going to look at how we can use technology for differentiated instruction and personalization. And this is going to include some suggestions for the technology to use, such as Socrative or Rewordify. And we're also going to make connections to various frameworks and design models, such as TPACK and Marzano, just to name a few.

When we're looking at using an LMS, we're going to look specifically at how Sophia can serve as a learning model system. So we're going to actually walk through the steps of putting a tutorial on Sophia. We're also going to talk about some tips and strategies for using an LMS in your classroom. And we're going to discuss the usefulness, making connections directly to a 1 to 1 or BYOD classroom, as well as flipped learning.

For our last objective, which is reflecting on student feedback, we're going to go over various ways to collect the feedback. We're also going to talk about some tips and strategies for collecting feedback. We're going to talk about how to use the feedback to change your lessons and make them more meaningful. And we're also going to talk about why student feedback is useful at all, and possibly the most useful type of feedback you can have as a teacher.

So why do these matter in the real world? Well, personalization and differentiation have been around in the educational world for a long time. And it's important that we remember that students are complex people, which means that their learning is going to be influenced by a number of different things.

With that being said, we're going to look at student profiles. And we're going to start to see our students as the whole child. Just as we are multifaceted adults whose home lives, and culture, and gender, and multiple intelligences affect the way that we work and live, the same is true for our students.

Also, when we integrate technology, pedagogy, and content, it's just a beautiful way to bring together 21st century Web 2.0 skills, pedagogy, which is the way that we teach the lessons, it's our toolbox of teaching strategies, and content area. This is essential to being successful in the classroom. Using an LMS takes technology even further. We do live in a 21st century world, and we're moving more towards flipped classrooms. By becoming familiar with an LMS, you won't be left behind the curve when learning is moving towards us in the future.

And reflecting on feedback is just a practice of a good teacher. We don't only want the feedback from our administrators and from our peers, or even from our parents. The most valuable feedback is the feedback of the students in the classroom. We need to know what works for them and what doesn't. And this doesn't have to be complicated. We can use technology to help us.

Everything in this unit is going to be connected. When we identify learner needs and strengths, we're able to better differentiate instruction and provide personalized learning. With personalized learning and differentiated instruction in mind, we're going to create units that incorporate technology, content, pedagogy. Then we need to find a way to deliver those units to the new learners who are web savvy. This is where using technology takes place.

And then we're going to use student feedback, whether it's the old-fashioned way through a suggestion bin or by using a website such as Socrative or Google Forms to gather it. Based on that student feedback, we're going to start all over again at, what are my learners' needs? And how can I fix this unit? And how does the feedback affect the delivery of the unit? And so on.

So to review, we're going to cover quite a lot in this unit. We talked about with the different learning objectives are and how these learning objectives are connected. We also discussed why these learning objectives matter Thanks for joining me. I hope you enjoyed the unit.