First Experience Developing ASSURE Lesson Plans & Digital Spreadsheets

I believe NETS*T Standard III is the most applicable, specifically III. C and III.D. The lesson plan that I developed concerning Stream Condition Monitoring required the students to conduct research utilizing the Internet. Standard III.C refers to applying technology to develop students creativity and higher level learning skills. The students had to use logic to search for appropriate web sites concerning the subject matter. They also had to utilize a spreadsheet to log collected data and produce a graph that correlated relationships of the data. It was up to the students to then utilize their analytical ability to come up with conclusions.

This was the first lesson plan that I have ever had to write. I had to do my own research on various lesson plan writing styles and I printed and filed many examples. I even had to research what exactly an ASSURE lesson plan was. I utilized box.net to store some of the downloaded material along with my computer's hard drive and a removable thumb drive. The lesson plan examples that Dr. Cyrus provided were also utilized. In order to store the Lesson Plan with the formatting that I desired I utilized the web site creator synthasite.com.

Developing well written lesson plans is a skill that will come with practice. I was out of my "comfort zone" while completing this assignment. There were so many things that I had to learn in a short time span. This was a test of my own self-efficacy, a belief about one's own capability to organize and complete a course of action required to accomplish a specific task (Bandura, 1986, 1997; Schunk, 2004). One of my favorite things about this assignment was the vast amount of information that I found on-line to increase my knowledge in specific areas. The vast amount of knowledge that can be found on-line is also somewhat overwhelming. I found myself learning one tool or knowledge set and then searching beyond the immediately required knowledge due to my own curiosity. One has to learn when to stop searching for knowledge once enough has been acquired to complete a task otherwise tasks will not be completed in the required time frame.

References

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bandura, A (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman.

Shunk, D.H., & Pajares, F. (2004). Self-efficacy in education revisited: Empirical and applied

evidence. In D.M. McInerney & S. Van Etten (Eds.), Big theories revisited. Greenwich, CT

Information Age.