Rationale for Use of Technologies in my Lesson Plan

Creating a lesson which utilizes a number of new technologies to be delivered to my grad school class in twenty minutes or less was a difficult task. Being able to use technologies that would create both concrete and interactive experiences for the class, while having my classmates reflect on the material and increase their level of critical thinking, not to mention including a form of informal analysis...it was tough to fit it all in.  All of my different technologies had a specific purpose and seemed to work well to meet many of the objectives, unfortunately there were some things that were still left wanting.

I started with a formative assessment by creating a sort of pretest on Google Forms.  This allowed me to grasp what each of the students knew going in.  In a situation where I had more time, I could have used that information to focus my instruction on items that people were lacking, or I could have used it to focus on certain individuals who needed more attention.  As it was, I wasn’t able to impart a much information, so I wasn’t really able to differentiate things the way i would have liked.

One of the few pieces of instructional input I had was some YouTube videos that I created when I was in high school that showed the origin stories of Judaism and Islam.  The purpose of these were to give the students some much needed background information, but also to engage them by allowing them to see me, as the instructor, interact with the material. While this did not do much for increasing the level of thought, it did provide some concrete material for them.

I then had the students reflect on what they had seen, as well as what they could quick research via Google, as far as the commonalities between these two religions and their relationship with Jerusalem.  This did not go as I planned.  First off, I did not have a hashtag picked out beforehand, which was an oversight on my part and created some confusion. Secondly, this did not create the level of interaction between members of the class and the material as I had hoped.  In retrospect, I should have pressed harder for deeper thought because this twitter exercise ended up being mostly useless.

Another thing I was going to do, which would have led to good interaction was to have the students get into groups and create a fake facebook wall for Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, or any other prominent figure they chose.  This would have allowed them to create and consider the connections between all of the individuals, and therefore between the religions.  This had to be scrapped again due to time constraints, but I think it would have been a fun and very helpful activity for true learning.

Finally, I brought up the Pop v Soda Map to demonstrate the differences in what people believe and call similar things.  The idea that people who disagree on this triviality while living together when juxtaposed with the world map displaying the predominant religion seemed to be a huge success.  This really seemed to get people making the connections I intended about coexistence and got them thinking more deeply about the effect these sorts of things have on the world as a whole.  

I guess as a final analysis, all of these technologies would have been highly useful in attaining the stated objectives had they been implemented correctly. I made a lot of mention about “time” in the beginning of this reflection.  In retrospect, you only have a certain amount of time to achieve certain goals.  I knew how much time I had before I started planning, and I decided to try and cram everything into to small of a window.  I think if I had it to do over again, I’d probably try to cover less material and give the material I did cover a little more depth.  That said, I was happy overall with the technologies I used and I’m glad to have learned what I did.