Lesson Plans

Technologies Education

There are many different approaches to developing Lesson Plans, and they are useful when beginning teaching. Most experienced teachers develop a very abbreviated approach that blends into unit planning, but at this stage of your initial teacher education, we will be focusing on your lesson structure, sequencing, timing, and differentiation. In these aspects, lesson plans excel in forcing you to plan and reflect on how you are teaching.

Technologies Education has a strong focus on Project Based Learning, and in it's full articulation, with student initiated and managed projects, lesson planning becomes more about identifying the needs of individual students or groups, and dynamically meeting these needs. However, before you can fly, you need to be able to walk, and every teacher needs to be able to manage and teach a class in a tightly controlled, teacher centred way, even if it is hoped you will quickly progress from this to include other pedagogical approaches to teaching.

You must submit your lesson plans BEFORE your tutorial each week. During tutorials you will have 3 minutes to orally explain your two lesson plans (Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies), and then 2 minutes to receive brief feedback from each of the peers in your group.

Lesson Plans

To assist you in developing lesson plans that can be easily modelled in the simSchool simulation tools, and that will help develop the concepts we are focusing on in this course, a template is provided for you structure your lesson plans. You will also use this structure to submit your four best lesson plans to your Portfolio of Learning assessment task.

While many lesson plan templates rightly include other elements important in teaching, this template focuses just on those aspects we are learning about in Technologies Education.

Show timings in real minutes and simulated seconds in brackets. 1 minute lesson time is 10 seconds simulation time, i.e. 10 minutes is 100 seconds in the simulation.

Simulate using simSchool

Lesson Tasks:

Where no task matches, choose the closest. You will need to input activities into simSchool quickly so you should code your tasks e.g. for a 10 minute Written Test, describe it as: 10 question Programming Test 1(7) 10min(100sec) or for a session where students are designing a solution to a problem, describe it as: Brainstorming Ideas 3(6) 5min(50sec).

1. Recall

Do Nothing
Q&A with students
Review previous lessons
Short Oral/Written Quiz
Student presentation on a concept/design/evaluation, etc.)
(Ignore, we rarely do poetry readings in Tech Ed)
Written/prep-prepared Test

3. Strategic Thinking

1. Students take notes

2. Play a game

3. Analyse a text, video, designed solution, computer program, database, etc. (Design and Computational Thinking)

4. Create a graphic, infographic, concept map, database, etc. (Computational Thinking: Data)

5. Compare and contrast approaches. (Systems Thinking)

6. Design a solution to a problem. (Design Thinking)

2. Skill/Concept

Silent reading/viewing about concept or skill
Oral explanation about concept or skill
Group work activity
Model and have students follow in completing an activity

4. Extended Thinking

Student led discussion on a concept (Evaluation)
Create a solution to a problem. (Design Process)
Develop a project plan. (Strategic Thinking)
Develop a hypothesis. (Futures Thinking)

Lesson Plan Template

Your name and week number
Subject of the lesson: Digital Technologies or Design and Technologies.
Year Level of the lesson.
Time required to complete the lesson: 40 minutes, 400 seconds simulation time (approx. 7 minutes, 6.67 minutes to be exact).
List of required materials and resources (e.g. websites) for the lesson.
List of objectives, which may be Processes and production skills (what the student can do at lesson completion) or knowledge and Understanding (what the student knows at lesson completion). These should be drawn from the Australian Curriculum. Include curriculum code, e.g. Recognise different types of data and explore how the same data can be represented in different ways (ACTDIK008).
The anticipatory set that focuses students on the lesson's skills or concepts—these include showing pictures, models, videos; asking leading questions; reviewing previous lessons; etc. Detail the simSchool activity best related to this and how long you will spend on it, e.g. Hacking Video 2(1) 5min(50sec)
An instructional component that describes the sequence of events/activities that make up the lesson. Detail the simSchool activities best related to these and how long you will spend on them. e.g. View website on cloud types 2(1) 10min (100 sec), Observe and classify clouds in sky 2(2) 5min (50sec), Record Weather in Database 3(4) 5min (50sec), Online Quiz on cloud types 1(4) 10min (100sec).
Independent practice that allows students to extend skills or knowledge on their own. Detail the simSchool activity best related to this and how long you will spend on it, e.g. Programming Tutorial 2(4) 10min(100sec)
An evaluation component, a test for mastery of the instructed skills or concepts—such as a set of questions to answer or a set of instructions to follow. Detail the simSchool activity best related to this and how long you will spend on it, e.g. Robot Programming Challenge 1(7) 5min(50sec)
A summary, where the teacher wraps up the lesson and answers questions. Detail the simSchool activity best related to this and how long you will spend on it, e.g. Review Lesson 1(3) 2min(20sec)