My first reaction to knowing I 'have' to teach a lesson with technology is, "Do I really have to do it? Haven't I already had enough with just planning one lesson? Where can I find the time to think about incorporating technology?"
Indeed, it would be easy if we could just enjoy using technology for personal use, and are not actually forced to think. For this quest, I felt most challenged by time and ideas. It took me a lot of time to research and gather information for my lesson, so any attempts to use tech so far had been piecemeal and not directly contributed to a learning objective: e.g. playing Kahoot to review for a test. Concurrently, it took me just as long to brainstorm activities for students to deliver that information, and as a result, including tech just seemed like an additional, difficult task.
However, fortunately, this lesson design later proved to me that maybe I shouldn't complain so much.
I was planning a lesson on India-Pakistan's Partition. There was a lot of factual information students needed to know in order to make sense of the event, to the point that it worried me that the lesson would become potentially didactic. Suddenly, an idea popped up in my head: 'Instead of telling students where these places are and there were people migrating back and forth these places, why don't I use what I was already introduced to? Google Maps would be a great tool here to teach students geography and generate a more experiential learning!'
And I'm glad I made the switch from lecture to actually giving students a task to work on Google Maps. I learned from implementing it and had clear ideas what support I would provide to students to order to address management issues, and to enable students to better succeed at it. And what's best? It was NOT an extra activity, but directly targeted the main learning goal and standard!
However, fortunately, this lesson design later proved to me that maybe I shouldn't complain so much.
I was planning a lesson on India-Pakistan's Partition. There was a lot of factual information students needed to know in order to make sense of the event, to the point that it worried me that the lesson would become potentially didactic. Suddenly, an idea popped up in my head: 'Instead of telling students where these places are and there were people migrating back and forth these places, why don't I use what I was already introduced to? Google Maps would be a great tool here to teach students geography and generate a more experiential learning!'
And I'm glad I made the switch from lecture to actually giving students a task to work on Google Maps. I learned from implementing it and had clear ideas what support I would provide to students to order to address management issues, and to enable students to better succeed at it. And what's best? It was NOT an extra activity, but directly targeted the main learning goal and standard!