Summary of “Implementing a Unit of Study that Leverages the Use of Technology"

Video Transcription

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

Well, the first learning objective for the unit was to analyze personalized learning and differentiation strategies, and to discuss how they connect to the objectives that we develop for our unit of study. Along the same lines, we want to develop a unit of study that integrates technology, pedagogy, and content, while also using the theories, models, and frameworks presented in this coursework, such as personalization or differentiated instruction.

We also discussed how to deliver a unit of study using SOPHIA or another LMS of your choice. This is a great way for students to access information, collaborate virtually, and create and publish their work. Lastly, we reflected on student feedback to our newly implemented units of study, and we talked about how we can improve or refine the unit based on that student feedback.

So looking more closely at each one, when we look at personalization and differentiated instruction strategies, we talked about the five essential elements of personalized instruction. We also discussed what personalized instruction looked like in a K through 12 classroom.

For differentiated instruction, we discussed what that entailed, and that means differentiating the content, which is the subject area that you're teaching; differentiating the process, which is how you teach it; differentiating the product, which is how students present mastery; and differentiating the environment, which is the physical learning environment, as well as the classroom mentality.

When we discussed developing a unit of study, we talked about how to use Understanding by Design to create a lesson that features personalization and differentiated instruction. We also talked about the role of technology, and we named lots of examples of technology you can use when trying to have a DI classroom or to have personalized instruction.

We also connected this to other frameworks, such as TPACK, Understanding by Design, and Marzano to name a few. We also talked about using a learning model software to deliver our units. Specifically, we looked at how to create a unit on SOPHIA.

In general, we talked about tips and strategies for using an LMS, and we also discussed their usefulness. Because as we're moving towards this 21st century world, and we're teaching computer-savvy students, it's important that we understand how to use LMSs, especially if the opportunity to work with a flipped classroom presents itself.

Lastly, we reflected on student feedback. We looked at the different ways to collect the student feedback, such as having suggestion bins, or getting written feedback from the students, or doing one-on-one interviews with younger students. We also talked about how to use the feedback to change our lessons. And we talked about why feedback is useful. We also gave some tips and strategies for collecting feedback that wasn't so labor intensive on the teacher. And this included using various technologies, such as Google Forms.

This unit matters because it really has a lot of real-world connections, specifically if you are teaching in the classroom. Personalization and differentiation is important. We have it in every aspect of our lives. With that being said, it's no different when we go into a school. We are multifaceted people, and our students are multifaceted people. We need to learn what all of those differences are, so that we can reach the whole child.

Integrating technology, pedagogy, and content is so important because it's putting your content into practice using these 21st century skills that we want to model for our students anyway. It also helps you not fall behind the curve with the newest technology that's out there.

An extension of that was using an LMS to create lessons. We want to become as familiar as possible with an LMS because these things aren't going away. We're moving away from the sage on the stage who lectures for an hour and a half to the class, and we're moving more towards flipped learning and learning that's interactive and online.

Collecting feedback is important because this is something that professional educators do. We want to be up to date on what our students need and on what the best practices are for our students. And there's no better way to find that information out than asking the students themselves.

Besides these real-world connections, each of the objectives in our unit are connected to each other. We start off by identifying learner needs, and we talked a lot about student profiles and what goes into those. Armed with our student profiles, we move on towards creating a lesson or a unit. And this is where we're putting our content into practice. We're combining pedagogy and technology here as well.

And then we're taking it a step further by delivering the unit using technology such as SOPHIA. And then we're using that very valuable student feedback to start the process all over again, or to tweak the unit that we're already in.

So today we talked about what the learning objectives were for this unit and how these objectives were connected. We also talked about why these objectives matter. I hope you enjoyed the unit as much as I enjoyed presenting it. Happy teaching.