Using the ASSURE model for my first digital spreadsheet lesson plan was a really interesting and enjoyable experience. I learned a lot about how to use the ASSURE model and loved how it guided me to make a lesson plan for the first time. The topic that I wanted to focus on was the Civil War’s top ten costliest battles. Therefore, by using the ASSURE model I was able to develop a concrete lesson plan that I hope to use when I become a teacher.
One standard from the National Education Technology Standards for Teachers that I feel could be applied to this assignment is standard 1a. NETS*T standard 1a is promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness. I feel that this lesson plan would help the students be creative in analyzing each battle and will describe what happened. This standard would also apply to this lesson plan because it promotes students to be creative when they use their Civil War data and graph it.
There are numerous things that I learned about lesson planning activities. The first would be that lesson planning takes time. Every time that I was typing anything that the students were supposed to be doing I had to sit back and look at it as if I was the student. I even tried setting up the graph with all the information I was instructing the students to take down in the lesson plan. The second thing that I learned about lesson planning activities is that I figured that I would have to make this fun and interesting. This is because if the lesson plan activity is boring, then my students will be bored as well. What I think would be the interesting factor about this lesson plan is for the students to wonder why so many soldiers were engaged during each battle and why so many had died. The third comes from a book that I read during my Adolescent Psychology course. According to John W. Santrock, Cognitive constructivist approaches emphasize the child’s active, cognitive construction of knowledge and understanding. They also state that it is the teacher’s role us to provide support for students to explore their world and develop understanding (Santrock, 2007). I believe this is truw for anyone who wants to become a teacher. With this lesson plan, I believe it will help students understand the world that they live in and the history of it. Once they learn about the mistakes of the past they can be prepared not to make the same or similar mistakes for the future. That is the power of history that I want my students to learn. The point of learning history is so they we do not repeat the same mistakes.
The new technology tool that I used to complete this assignment was Microsoft Excel 2007. Previous Microsoft Excel versions are able to do almost the same exact things as the 2007 version of Microsoft Excel. However, the difference with the past versions and the 2007 version is that the 2007 version is heavily more user friendly. I was so amazed at how easy it was to find things like inserting a chart or deleting a cell in Microsoft Excel 2007. Therefore, I believed it to be a must do to include Microsoft Excel 2007 into my lesson plan.
There is not much that I liked least about this assignment because it was a very enjoyable experience. This was enjoyable because I was seeing myself as a student and doing the assignment and thought it was an interesting idea. However, the only thing that I liked least about this assignment was that it took quite a while to come up with. I wanted to make this lesson plan fun and interesting for the students. Therefore, I had to be careful when I was drafting what it is I was expecting the students to do and what they were to learn.
What I liked the most of this assignment was that I was able to use technology and apply it to the Civil War which not that much students would consider interesting. I believe that students will have fun with this assignment and learn a great deal about the Civil War as well. This assignment has not only given me a great deal of insight of using Microsoft Excel in my lesson plan, but to include other programs as well. I plan to include not only Microsoft Excel in future lesson plans but also Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint.
When I was a student throughout middle school and high school we never did this type of lesson activity. However, we are in an era that requires us as students and teachers to be technologically literate. Therefore, by doing this lesson plan I have learned to use my technology skills and apply it to a lesson plan to help my students learn the fun way.
References
Santrock, J. (2007). Schools: Approaches to educating students. In Adolescence
(pp. 345). New York: McGraw-Hill
