My First Lesson Plan

I may be in my second year of education, but I had not planned a lesson up until now. EDTC 400 gave me a chance to experience my first lesson plan. My partner Brandon and I were tasked with creating a digital literacy mini-lesson that connects to a grade and class of our choice.

Planning

Both Bandon and I are in the secondary program, so we chose grade 10. We were not really sure which outcomes and indicators we could connect this to, so we decided to come up with a general idea for our digital literacy outcome.

For us, getting started was the hardest part. We both had never made a lesson plan before and were not sure how to get started. After looking at the digital literacy curriculum, we chose to focus our lesson on fact checking and fake news. Fake news is a major concept that has been a major part of everyone’s lives. We thought this would engage students in a topic that they could be interested in.

The idea we came up with helped jumpstart our planning. It came pretty easily from there. Surprisingly to me the hardest or most time consuming part was hashing out all of the details, making sure the power-points, menti, and any other presentation pieces work smoothly.

The part I liked the most during the planning process was actually creating the visuals to go along with the actual information. I have always felt that the visual part of the presentation is what keeps students engaged and interested in the lesson. Speaking of engaging the students, we wanted to make fact checking as fun and exciting as possible because many students feel that fact checking is very boring. The best part of this lesson was definitely the final creative aspect. We asked students to make memes based on fact checking. Of course our students were our EDTC 400 classmates, but they definitely delivered!

You can check out our lesson plan here. It is the Digital Literacy, EDTC 400 mini-lesson.

Teaching

Of course this was our first time teaching a lesson and I was very nervous and excited to see how it would go. Brandon and I tried our very best to be as prepared as possible. We even wrote ourselves a rough script which you can see in the lesson plan.

Overall, Brandon and I felt that our lesson went way better than planned. Honestly, I was very impressed by how our lesson went. The timing worked out perfectly. We even had just a little bit of extra time for some groups to make more than one meme. I am very proud of our lesson. For our first lesson ever, I don’t think it could have gone any better.

Check out some memes:

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