Due to COVID-19, teacher candidates in the 2019/20 Bachelor of Education program have had to quickly adapt their teaching and learning styles through the use of online platforms. We are showcasing some of the wonderful examples of projects created by them as part of the community field experience.
Ash Clement-Thorne
BEd Elementary & Middle Years (CITE)
- What is the name of the community partner or group you are working with?
- Lakewood Elementary School
- What is your project’s subject area(s)?
- English Language Arts
- Tell us about your project!
- This unit is designed to be highly adaptable to the needs of the teacher and their class. The activities can be applied to any short story. You can read multiple short stories in a row and wrap up the unit with the “Book Talks” lesson, or you can read a single short story and move on to other subjects.
The projects should take students a full week to complete and they should be able to do them mostly independently. This model works well for asynchronous distance learning. However, the activities will easily transfer into the face-to-face classroom.
- Did you face any particular challenges in the planning, making or delivery of this project?
- The most challenging part was getting students to read instructions! (This was a consistent problem with all of our asynchronous lessons.) I’ve modified the choice board to be more colourful and simplified the instructions. The detailed activity instructions could be useful to some students who need extra guidance, but most students did not read these instructions.
The teachers at my practicum school in my grade group and I ran into technical difficulties with the platform we originally chose for the audiobook recordings, Padlet. Despite our students being familiar with the platform and everything looking fine on the test student account, very few students were able to successfully record their audio file. Eventually we simply asked students to record their audiobook on their computer or phone and upload the file to Google Classroom.
- Can you tell us about a highlight of creating this remote lesson plan?
- I was impressed by my students’ creativity. Their projects were all very unique and showed how they were engaging with the text. I was able to see their understanding of character, plot, conflict, and structure through their projects. The best part was that one student discovered he liked writing so much that he started writing a novel!
- What media did you use to create your project?
- Google Classroom and Drive
- Where can we view your project?
- http://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iO8YgN_XMPcQd0vLINOaBm2T3iE3ANzr?usp=sharing