Teaching this plant function lesson would be a lot of work,
but a lot of fun, both for me and the students. I will be teaching this 4th
grade class about the function of the stem and reviewing the function of
leaves. Because we are adding to previous knowledge, I think the students will
be ready to jump right in. We will have both an experiment with celery, and an
ipad activity to help the students stay fully engaged throughout the class.
Advantages: Students get bored quickly with worksheets, and
diagrams or videos on the board are not individualized enough, so having an app
on the ipad where all of the students can individually identify elements of the
plant both keeps them more engaged and more interested, and also helps me know
how well they understand the material.
I think the lesson really comes to life when we add the
experiment with the ipad (and other teaching elements.) Each student will be
responsible to conduct their own experiment, and this is always fun for
students. After the experiments are completed, the ipad app will reinforce what
they just learned, and also tell me that the students not only had fun with the
experiment, but also learned what they needed to learn.
Drawbacks: This is about a 6:1 preparation to teaching time
ratio, and the preparation can be exhausting. Also it can be so easy to forget to charge the ipads,
or to arrive and find that one of the ipads is buggy. At my school, using ipads
is particularly challenging because student use their own devices, and they are
of all shapes and sizes. So before the lesson we need to make sure that
everyone has the correct app installed and that it works with the operating system
in place.
It is always a risk to bring ipads into a classroom where
there is room to hide. With so many students doing experiments and worksheets,
and ipad work, it will be important for me to monitor the ipad use to make sure
that no one is playing with the devices instead of doing their work.
All in all I am very excited to try this lesson out!
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