Lesson Plans on Steriods

For my current Masters’ class – Teaching with Technology, we had to go to http://lessonbuilder.cast.org/ and create a lesson using the UDL Lesson Builder. This is an online tool for building lessons – especially those that integrate technology.

The format or lesson template is a good one – asks some important questions about learning goals and assessment. The interface is easy to use and you can print to PDF when you’re finished. I particularly liked the materials portion – allowing you to enter all kinds of digital and non-digital resources and materials that it lists (with links and info) for you at the end of the lesson template.

I like the way the template makes you really think about each portion of the lesson – and the helpful definitions and model lessons on the site make it easy to work your way through the process.

We would not use the online part of the lesson planner in my district because we already have lesson planning software – Eduphoria’s Forethought – but I think I will take the ideas from the template and create a checklist and “Things to think about” list for when they create their lessons in our current format. I may encourage those teachers who would like to work on a large scale technology project to go ahead and use the builder – and then attach the pdf to their lesson in Forethought…so that teachers can have the benefit of thinking through all of the steps of the lesson.

Overall verdict: Good tool – free to boot! This is definitely one I will be sharing with my teachers.

(1 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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