Artifact # 11
Context: The lesson plan was created during my internship at Beech Mountain Elementary School in the Elementary Education block semester of Spring 2002 at Appalachian State University.
Impact: Because it is so challenging to fit technology, current events, citizenship and grammar into the regular school day, this lesson plan was created to give students experience looking up sources of information about a United States governor on the Internet, selecting one of his policies, and then creating a formatted letter to send to that governor detailing three reasons the student agreed with the policy or three reasons the student was opposed to the policy. This lesson incorporated computer skills such as using an Internet search engine, deciding which Internet sites were more likely to have reliable information, and typing with learning about current events in the United States and what the governor of a state actually has control over. Students practiced citizenship by writing in support or in opposition to the governors' policies, practiced persuasive writing and letter-writing formats.
Alignment: This is an interdisciplinary comprehensive project
that meets many requirements of the fifth grade curriculum according to
the North Carolina Standard Course of Study (Tech.
Competency 10.1, 10.4, 10.5, 12.7,
INTASC Standard 1). The lesson
uses the Internet as the means for learning about what a policy is and
who the governor of a certain state is and facilitates students' understanding
of government (Tech. Competency 11.1, 11.4,
INTASC Standard 7).
To perform this task, students must find their information on the Internet
using a search engine and then decide which information is valuable to
the project and which information is not needed (Tech.
Competency 12.1). Students were encouraged to use government
webpages due to their respectability, professionalism, and accuracy (Tech.
Competency 13.4).
Students are required to type their final letter to turn in for a grade
that demonstrates the students' grasp of word processing, the letter-writng
formats, and the assignment in general (Tech.
Competency 12.2, INTASC Standard
8).
Because each student had a different governor to research, their own
computer in the computer lab, and they were in disbelief that we would
actually send the letters, students spent time on task and learning
instead of being distracted (Tech. Competency
14.2, 12.4, 12.5, INTASC
Standard 5). Students took responsibility for identifying and
using their own technological resources to create a letter that reflected
student thought (INTASC Standard 4,
6).
Students had the freedom to choose the websites and policies they understood
so that a child who has trouble speaking English could have looked up a
website in Spanish or a learning disabled (in reading) child could pick
a shorter or easier-to-read policy. AIG students could likewise be
appropriately challenged (INTASC Standard
3).
The students completed the computer-based parts of this assignment
during their computer time with the classroom intern and the computer teacher
present to supervise or assist any student that had a question about either
the assignment or the technology involved in the assignment (INTASC
Standard 10).