Teachers and Lesson Planning

Teachers and Lesson Planning
-A SAMPLE LESSON PLAN TEMPLATE-

As a road map for car travelers in a long trip, a lesson plan is, for teachers, by all means, a must-have and a must-prepare. A lesson plan is that little helper for Santa Claus, but this one is the teacher’s instead. It consists mainly of aims that a teacher should achieve and that are knowledge not known to their students before and hoped to be known at the end of a session or a multiplicity of sessions.

A lesson plan specifies the where, when, what to do, how to do it and who does it. It is about the where to start and end, the when to start and end an activity or a lesson. It is, by far, specific as far as the question of what to do, how to do it and who does it (Teacher or students) is raised.

A professional, well-structured, confident is that teacher who gets his lesson plans into their class.

The following URL link gets you a sample lesson plan template:

http://www.box.net/shared/3krqtrzsdx

p.s. Next lesson plan template will be competency-approach based

By: Nouamane ERRIFKI

Interactive WhiteBoards

Interactive WhiteBoards
(IWBs)
Or the ‘Smart Boards’

Once and when I was all in the process of checking my inbox, I stumbled over an e-mail of which title goes as: ‘IWB’. Well, as a matter of fact, there wasn’t only one e-mail of such a title, there were plenty others a thing that triggered my curiosity. I tried to guess its meaning and I failed. I read the e-mail and I didn’t get it. Desperate, brain frozen and frustrated even, I tried to personally decipher the meaning of that acronym by digging it. And you know what did I find? It simply stands for ‘Interactive White Board’.

Caption: An Interactive Whiteboard

In fact that finding still didn’t quench my desire for knowing at the time. So I decided to go on through another research on Google to further understand what they mean by that ‘IWBs’ of theirs. The first things I knew is that it is a new technology exploited in classrooms and the interactive whiteboards are also named ‘Smart Boards’, things I didn’t know before.

In one of the recordings related to our subject, Sara Walker, 7 years of experience in ICT, defined the ‘IWBs’ in simple terms: ‘(the interactive whiteboard) looks like a huge computer screen on your wall. It’s slightly bigger than a normal whiteboard that you would write on, but it just looks like a flat computer screen stuck to the wall. The screen is top sensitive.’

Technically speaking, ‘An interactive whiteboard is a device that interprets a projected two-dimensional surface that interacts with a computer's desktop. A typical use is as an electronic whiteboard but it is generally an interactive type of computer screen.’
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)


Dazzling, isn’t it? Let me succinctly rephrase all of this for you!
An interactive whiteboard consists of two items: a computer and a top-sensitive whiteboard (that’s why it is called ‘interactive’ for its being sensitive to touch). Interaction, here, is three dimensional in the sense that the whiteboard interacts with the user and then with the computer’s hard disk. In other words, whatever you have got in your computer can be manipulated by you using your fingers or a special pen on the interactive whiteboard. Thus, your digital teaching resources, activities, videos, songs, graphics, drawings, even dictionaries that are stored in your hard disk are made available for your in-class teaching purposes. Even other facilities like the Internet are accessible. The News, TV shows also can be used as authentic materials. In brief, it is the world outside getting inside your classrooms ladies and gentlemen!!

To conclude it, watch this video and you get everything you need to know about these ‘Smarties ‘.

Remember that there must be a pedagogy behind everything we do in class; even when using a fine technology as fine as the Interactive Whiteboards.


By: Nouamane ERRIFKI