Putting your unit into a learning management system

Video Transcription

Welcome. I'm Trisha Fyfe. And in today's video lesson we will be looking at how you can put your unit into a learning management system. As we learn about this topic we'll work towards several learning objectives. And we'll use the following two questions to guide our learning in this video lesson. How can you use a learning management system to prepare instruction? And what does this look like when using Sophia?

We've been using the framework of Understanding by Design throughout this unit. Remember the three stages of Understanding by Design are-- identifying the desired results, determining acceptable evidence, and last, planning the learning activities. Today I'm going to walk you through how you can use Sophia to implement a lesson that is planned using Understanding by Design framework. I will use screenshots of the process, so make sure you pause and take notes as needed.

Let's start by looking at where you will end up after you log into Sophia. You can see here that there are many different areas to explore with this tool, but today we'll be focusing on building a tutorial. This is where you can insert unit or lesson information for your students to access.

The next step is to create a tutorial. This is where you can insert the lesson name and choose an image to represent your lesson, if you choose. As far as stage one, we want to make sure that our students can clearly and easily identify all of the elements here. Things like the established goal, or goals, the understandings to be developed, the essential questions and the key knowledge and skills.

There are really two options for including these elements into your unit or lesson on Sophia. The first is to add more information to your tutorial. Here you'll be prompted to add your objective for your lesson. And you can insert the elements of stage one here, including the objectives, learning targets, and essential questions. You can also use the summary text box, if you wish.

Another option is to insert text. And you can use the drop down menu and select text/image to do so. It will bring you here where you can add a title and add elements for this stage. You can create one box with each of them, or add multiple boxes for each element, such as objectives, essential questions, et cetera.

Let's move to stage two-- determining the acceptable evidence. While this tool will not allow you to fully complete the assessment necessary, we can add focus on the other evidence or formative assessment here to create a quiz, perhaps. You can do this by adding a quiz to your unit or lesson. This allows you to develop 4 to 20 questions that will show up in random order for your students. Students will need to get three correct to complete the quiz. And you can add in images or formulas. This is such a great tool.

Finally, we plan the learning activities. Here you have many options for developing your Sophia tutorial. You can add text, screencasts, such as the one you're watching right now, PowerPoints, or other slideshows and videos. You're not limited here, so this is a great way to add resources that help differentiate learning. For example, some students might be assigned certain elements, and others a different set of elements. But they could all be listed here.

Or you could give the choice to students for watching a certain number of the resources. Maybe two out of the three videos that you included. Or exploring the PowerPoint or the Prezi, and you would have one of each available. So many great ways to use the Sophia resource to develop a unit or lesson in your classroom. And there are many other great learning management systems out there for you to utilize.

Let's talk about what we learned today. We looked at the following questions-- how can you use a learning management system to prepare instruction? And what does this look like when using Sophia? Today I walked you through Sophia, an excellent resource available for you to present your understanding by design lessons or units to your students in digital form.

You can do so many great things with this tool and other learning management systems as well. Now that you're more familiar with these concepts, let's reflect. Do you currently use a learning management system in your own teaching? Why or why not? What benefits do you see in using a system such as Sophia in your instruction?

Thanks for joining me today in discussing the lesson-- putting your unit into a learning management system. I hope you found value in this video lesson and in all of the tools and resources that we went through, especially as we walked through Sophia. I hope you're able to use these ideas in your own teaching.

Now it's your turn to apply what you learned in this video. The additional resources section will be super helpful. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description, so you can easily target the resources that you want.