Lesson Design for a Digital Age: How to Utilize Technology and Inquiry to Transform your Teaching

By Grace Pokela

In Lesson Design for a Digital Age, seasoned educator and tech enthusiast Grace Pokela delivers a groundbreaking guide tailored specifically for teachers seeking to transform their traditional lessons into dynamic, interactive digital experiences. This comprehensive book combines pedagogical expertise with cutting-edge technology, providing a roadmap for educators to cultivate engaging, personalized learning environments.

 

Drawing upon Grace Pokela's extensive experience in both classroom teaching and educational technology integration, this book serves as a beacon for educators striving to adapt to the digital age. It offers practical strategies, real-world examples, and step-by-step instructions to seamlessly integrate technology into lesson planning, execution, and assessment.

 

Key Features:

• An Introduction to Modeling Instruction: If you have ever wondered what modeling style instruction could do for your classroom, Grace Pokela will show you. This powerful instructional technique forms the basis of a transformed digital classroom.
• Choice-Based Learning Paradigms: Lesson Design for a Digital Age emphasizes the importance of providing students with agency over their learning journey. The book introduces innovative strategies to infuse choice into lesson designs, fostering a sense of ownership and empowerment among learners.
• Personalized Differentiation Techniques: Grace Pokela delves into the art of differentiation, offering a wealth of adaptable methods to cater to diverse learning styles, abilities, and interests. Educators will discover how to leverage digital tools to scaffold instruction, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to thrive.
• Integrating Interactive Media: This guide explores a diverse array of multimedia options, such as interactive simulations, virtual escape rooms, and gamified learning experiences. Through vivid examples and hands-on exercises, educators will learn to create immersive, interactive content that captivates students.
• Navigating Digital Tools and Platforms: Grace Pokela demystifies the ever-evolving landscape of educational technology, offering insights into selecting the most effective tools for various learning objectives. The book includes ecommended platforms and resources, accompanied by practical tips for implementation.

Whether you're a tech-savvy teacher looking to refine your digital teaching skills or a newcomer eager to embark on this transformative journey, Lesson Design for a Digital Age is an indispensable resource. With its blend of pedagogical wisdom, practical guidance, and inspiring anecdotes, this book empowers educators to create dynamic, learner-centered environments that prepare students for success in the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pokela Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223767886

Grace Pokela

Grace Pokela is a passionate science teacher and curriculum designer with over 15 years experience in a wide variety educational settings. She currently lives in South Dakota with her wife and two children.

Book preview

Introduction

By March of 2020, I had spent six weeks dismissing student concerns about something called the coronavirus. Whenever it came up in discussion, I listed other diseases that had made the news, but never spread far beyond their origin point. What you should really be worried about, I said again and again, is the flu. On March 12, the administration canceled all after school activities and sent students straight home. One of my students, who hadn’t heard the news, came in for after school help. I’m sorry, I said, all after school activities are canceled.

He paused, and pulled himself upright. Whoa. We’re not coming back here.

Don’t be ridiculous, I said. I'll see you on Monday.

The following day, Friday the 13th, was a Superintendent’s Conference Day anyway. When teachers arrived, we discovered that all of the day’s previously scheduled events had been canceled. Instead, we were told that we should prepare a two week long contingency plan for our students, just in case. I made a packet of activities based on coronavirus itself while rumors flew. By the end of the school day, a tall stack of my packets sat on the desk, ready to be distributed to students the following week, if necessary. Suddenly, the PA system crackled to life. The principal, sounding harried, told us to be sure to bring home all of our personal effects. I gathered my things, walked out of my classroom, and did not set foot in it again for twelve calendar months.

We teachers were forced into the unprecedented world of remote learning. At first, educators weren’t sure what to do. Teachers were video-recording themselves giving lectures, or converting worksheets to digital documents and posting them online as is. But teachers are incredibly intelligent, flexible, and resourceful. Over time, I began to see a new style of lesson. Colleagues started sharing interactive digital lessons, with elements that students could drag and drop. As I played around with these, I quickly realized that these new, digital lessons presented a tremendous opportunity to improve instruction.

For me, the journey to digital lesson making was not too far off the path I had already been on as an educator. A major aspect of my teaching career has been creating curricula. When I started teaching, I wasn’t willing to settle for the materials that were pre-made and given to me. While veterans warned me not to reinvent the wheel, I made it my mission to make the most beautiful, animated presentations and guided notes that I could. I was tremendously proud of these presentations, and had spent countless hours creating them. But I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to stop talking. I wanted my students to be interacting with content from bell to bell. In short, I wanted to flip my classroom, but I wasn’t sure how.

This desire led me to take a 2 week long seminar on modeling instruction in August 2018. This was led by Glen Stuart, whom I can confidently say is one of the most incredible educators I have ever been privileged to meet. As I discovered in the seminar, modeling instruction is sort of like teaching upside down. Rather than presenting content to students and then asking them to interact with that content, as an instructor might do in a traditional style classroom, an instructor in a modeling style classroom presents students with a problem, a phenomena, a set of data, or some other real world connection. Then, subtly and skillfully, a modeling style instructor leads students on a journey of discovery- assisting them only as much as they need in order to discover the content themselves! I was absolutely inspired, and used modeling style instruction to transform my lessons. 

So, before the pandemic hit, I was already making lessons of which I was incredibly proud. Many of these lessons involved multiple components (both paper and other materials), and took a lot of work to prepare, inventory, and store. Additionally, although I loved my lessons, I knew they were still lacking in one major way. I desperately wanted to provide my students with choice and differentiation, but I was already running in circles making sure that all the moving pieces of my new lessons were present and accounted for. Planning additional activities on top of what I was doing was simply impossible.

For better and for worse, COVID changed everything, including the feasibility of specific lesson designs. Interactive, hyperlinked digital lessons, of the type that I first started seeing and making during the remote learning period of quarantine, have changed the teaching equation. This format makes it easy to provide students both with interesting, complex tasks, and with differentiation and choice. Freed from the burden of printing, copying, inventorying, and storing, I could let my creativity run wild. I could even use hyperlinks as a way to offer hidden, additional choices, as students with identical looking slides could actually be offered different tasks than one another without their knowledge, totally eliminating student shame.

I have been blown away by the effectiveness of digital lessons that I have created using Google Slides. The sheer creativity and tremendous personalization that is possible within this platform, along with the resulting ease of organizing, assigning, and grading them, has left me a true believer in this method of instruction. I have learned so much by creating lessons in this way, that I feel compelled to share it. I will present to you a number of advantages of and techniques for using Google Slides for lessons by showcasing real lessons and examples from my classroom.

It’s simply impossible right now, while we still reel from the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic, to estimate what the sum total of its societal effects will be. But as far as technology is concerned, it’s clear that COVID was a catalyst, causing a technological shift that likely would have eventually happened anyway to happen immediately. Technology is now integrated into our classrooms and professional working environments in profound ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago, and that integration will only increase exponentially in the future. If that sentence made you feel excited, then this book is for you. If that sentence filled you with trepidation, then this book is for you. Because I have discovered that digital, interactive lessons are transformative. Digital lessons offer numerous advantages over paper lessons, and aren’t difficult to make. I want to share with you everything that I have discovered: the techniques, advantages, and pitfalls of digital lesson making. I hope that by the end of this book, you will be able to easily make creative and effective lessons on your own, and be over-the-top excited about doing so. My profound desire is to reinvigorate your love of teaching, make your life easier for years to come, and to help your students have a more fulfilling experience inside of your classroom. Thank you for everything that you do, and thank you in advance for joining me on this journey.

Chapter One: Why use hyperlinked digital assignments instead of paper assignments?

Teachers today are facing unprecedented expectations and challenges. We must prepare for school facing an antagonistic public, standard changes, likely periods of remote learning, and the imperative of preparing students to face a dynamic future world that is unknown and largely unknowable. A task this complex and difficult needs to be accomplished with tools that allow teachers to be flexible, to be tremendously creative, and to respond in real time. Paper ain’t gonna cut it, folks. (See what I did there?)

Please allow me to set forth some of the reasons that I have made the switch from pen and paper to digital lessons, and why I will never look back. I suspect that, by the end of this chapter, you’ll be ready to take a match to your filing cabinet and take the printers and copiers out back with a baseball bat a la Office Space. Digital lessons will save you time and headaches, while simultaneously increasing student engagement, interest, and productivity.

Let me state quickly that Google isn’t paying me. This is not to say that I wouldn’t ACCEPT payment. Hit me up, Google! And don’t think for a second that I have some sort of corporate loyalty, because I absolutely don’t. I’m looking at you, Goggle Sloods.

But seriously, although my own lessons have been created using the Google platform, there are other programs that could be utilized to make these lessons as well. Outside of the appendix specifically for this purpose, I will try to keep instructions that are specific to Google, such as keyboard shortcuts, outside of the discussion as much as possible. Not only will this make this book more user-friendly for people choosing to use other platforms, but it will also hopefully make reading this book helpful even as specific steps within the program itself change. That being said, let’s go through some advantages that digital assignments have over non-digital lessons, so I can show you why you should jump in today and make the switch.

1. No Copy Machines

Look, I’m just going to start with the best reason I can think of to throw out the paper. NO MORE COPY MACHINES. Why would this be my number one? Allow me, please, to lead you on a thought experiment.

Imagine standing in line at 6:50 am, watching Mr. Humbert, who apparently has neither seen nor used a copy machine in his entire life, print out 70 page packets for each of his 150 students and YOU JUST NEED TEN COPIES BY SEVEN. Miraculously, he’s done. It’s 6:58. You program your copy job, press COPY and... yep. It jammed. You know those little tongs that came from the science room, but have now been repurposed for copy machine dissections? You grab them and start fishing. You manage to pull the mangled shreds of one of Mr. Humbert’spackets out of slot 4, which is situated behind drawer 3a. Slam the door shut, press COPY and ... whelp, now there’s a jam in slot 7q89. OK friends! It’s MOVIE DAY! Let's hope the principal doesn't stop by!

Ok, ok. I can feel your pulses racing. Stick with me, comrades, while we imagine a better world. Imagine having your mornings back. Imagine assigning your students as many tasks as you could ever want by pressing three buttons. Did you wake up sick with no sub plan? Press three buttons. Did Jamal and Suzie finish a task that you thought would take 45 minutes in only 10? Press three buttons. Did you realize that you accidentally left the key on the assignment you just gave out? Delete it, take a breath, and press three buttons. Are the copy machines upstairs out of ink, the ones on the south side of the building waiting for a replacement part, and even the super secret one in the principal’s secretary’s office doing nothing but flashing ERROR 43 over and over? MAYBE! But you know who couldn’t care less? YOU, my friend! Sit back, drink that coffee, press three buttons, and give yourself a pat on the back.

2. Digital assignments are so much easier to tailor to individual learning styles, and can be incredibly interactive

Educators all know that students learn best when they can interact with content material in a variety of ways. We are also phenomenally creative at making this happen, regardless of our classroom situations. But we are only human, and we only have 24 hours in a day. So, for example, let’s say that a teacher makes a memory game with picture cards in order to help her students learn the vocabulary for a difficult unit. That might be an incredible activity, but look at how much time the teacher put into this. She designed the activity. She found the pictures. She digitally made the cards. She formatted the cards so they were all the same size. She printed the cards. She cut out the cards. She may well have laminated the cards. And after the activity, she must collect, inventory, and store the cards in an organized way- or she may very well face having to start this arduous process all over again next year! And this scenario is assuming that your curriculum remains the same from one year to the next, which is not necessarily the case. Lessons involving complex activities are not only difficult to make, inventory, and store- they are also difficult to edit and change. If you think about the time and effort even one single activity requires, you can easily see why some techniques are only used a few times a year, or abandoned after a few years, even when they are effective.

This is not the case with digital lessons. A similarly designed task on Google Slides would still require the teacher to design the activity, find the pictures, and store the assignment digitally in a way that makes at least some sense. But so many tedious, time consuming steps (printing, cutting, laminating, collecting, inventory, and physically storing) are cut out. The master copy of the assignment cannot be destroyed by students. And often, once you have one assignment made, it is fairly simple to make a copy of it and to borrow some of the design elements to make your next one! This trick can be used to make lessons on different topics, or to alter a lesson to fit new district goals. The time saved is tremendous. For me personally, my teaching creativity has exploded since I started using Google Slides.

Additionally, because it is equally easy to assign a 5 slide long assignment and a 50 slide long assignment, it is incredibly easy to offer students multiple modalities to learn content. Let me address this further by discussing differentiation and choice.

3. Digital assignments offer incredible opportunities for differentiation, including differentiation that is hidden from students.

Is there any word that produces a collective groan from educators more than the word differentiation?

First, in case you spent the last few professional development meetings grading surreptitiously on your lap or singing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall '' silently in your head, let’s discuss what differentiation is. In general, teachers are tasked with determining what difficulty level their content should be. A teacher who asks a group of kindergartners to learn calculus or who expects a group of High School Seniors to line up and recite their ABC’s is comically out of line. But how does a teacher determine what content difficulty is appropriate? In an ideal world, students should generally be working within their zone of proximal development. The zone of proximal development is the

specific level of task that has a student working outside of the realm of their current knowledge or skill set, but not so far outside of their current realm that they have no idea how to begin. I always compare a student’s current understanding to a map. Imagine that you took a student, gave them a map, and dropped them off in the middle of the wilderness. (It’s just a thought experiment- go ahead, you can pick your most ornery kid!) Now, if you dropped this student off in an area that wasn’t on their map, but which was just next to it,