Module 4- Smartboard Lesson

After completing my first little teaching experience, I took a deep breath. While it was fairly basic in the instructions for what we needed to do, the execution and the feelings that came with it were new and challenging in certain ways. It was a very good small-scale look at how teachers function on a day to day basis, which both taught me a lot and scared me a little too. There is so much more work that goes on behind the scenes than what I initially considered. There is much more that a teacher does to prepare before a lesson than only teaching it.

            With this project, I was assigned to make my first lesson plan, a task that I had little to no familiarity with. Thankfully we had a template to follow, without which I would have been completely lost. As I continued through this part of the assignment, I was met with many different pieces that I did not realize were a part of every class. Each class I have gone through has had planning of some sort, and realizing all the little complexities that I may have to address and cover in it was a bit overwhelming. However, it was also really cool to acknowledge the work that goes into planning and performing a class.

            After completing this portion of the assignment, we had to make a Smartboard presentation. Having been around Smartboards most of my educational career, I was comfortable with maneuvering its tools and such. However, there were many more layers that I did not really understand. I had to sift through all the tools that this program provided, picking and choosing the ones that I though were necessary and appropriate for my lesson. I also wanted to choose some that would be creative, interactive, and fun for my students to work with. After choosing everything, I had to tailor the tools and pages to what I wanted to accomplish in teaching during these five minutes.

            The final element of this project was the presentation. After completing this portion, I realized just how important it was that I had planned beforehand and worked within an outline that I had prepared. This proved critical, both in time management and also how to emphasize our “Engage-Connect-Launch” focus for beginning a class. There were so many events that took place in the presentation that I could not practice for, especially in how the students responded to my prompts and interactions. That being said, my outline and preparation helped me to get a good hold of where I wanted to go and to be able to cut out pieces that I would not have time for.

Overall, this first experience of planning a lesson and then carrying out my lesson plan taught me that there are many more intricacies that are involved in the preparation and presentation of a class period. I learned that it takes a lot of work at preparing to be ready to adapt to whatever a class happens to throw at you on any given day. It taught me that preparation is key, but is not the “end all” of how a teacher works in their daily work.