Jenn Phase 3

Assessing Prior Knowledge
My way of doing this wouldn't change much except I think I would have check more about what kind of weathers the students already know about (snow, rain, sunny, etc.). Otherwise I think that this part of the lesson went well because we were starting something new, A Weather Introduction, so the students might not have known a lot about this subject of weather.

Planning Instruction
I had a lot of fun with this part because we wanted to integrate reading, and I love literacy lessons. I think one of the hardest parts was choosing a book. It had to be a book that we could access. First we looked online to see if there was a way to read it online, we checked on books that our instructors might have that we could use. Once we chose the book, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the lesson idea and plan just came together.

Designing Instruction
This part was actually pretty easy. Since we were integrating literacy with our weather unit, we decided to base almost our entire lesson around the book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Planning Assessment
When planning our assessment there was one type of assessment that we were going to do after they finished the assignment. We left the assignment open ended so that the students could explore the technology and prepare a presentation any way that they may have wanted. The way that we graded them was by a rubric that grades their creativity and use of technology with a final grade out of 16.

Instructional Decisions/Teaching
I learned from watching other groups that it might have been better to break up our lesson into a couple shorter activities instead of having one big long activity, like we did. This is only because we had students finishing really early and then going off onto facebook or something. If not having a lot of different short activities, it might have been better to have something extra that the students could do when they are done as maybe an extra credit thing.

Assessment of Learning
I think that that in this aspect we did well. It is important to let students have the creative freedom that we gave them and grade them in different ways, but still have a standard to it. We did this because we had a rubric but it didn't grade their knowledge as much as be framed around their creativity. This way they could create a presentation that went with whatever learning style works with them best.
I think in the future I would have individual- and group-assessments because it gives the students a sense of owning their grade, as well as if they thought they did better on a certain part than I did, it gives them a chance to argue/justify why they think they did better, and their grade could be modified.