The Weekly Schedule is found on the Course at a Glance page, but is also outlined here.
Think of each of these weekly pages as a ‘lesson flow’ that outlines the intention for the lesson and the learning objectives for each week. The weekly pages provide some content relevant to the topic for the week as well as some activities to engage you with the content and topics. Critical digital literacies are infused and immersed into these activities. Each weekly page also provides actions you need to complete during the week, depending on your personal weekly schedule.
While this course is an online course, and works very differently than face to face learning experiences, taking this ‘lesson flow’ framework into your teaching and lesson planning should be considered. Here’s how one middle school teacher outlines a lesson flow with her students to prompt your thinking.
Lesson Flow in Online Learning
You have experienced the lesson plan as a core element of your teaching practice. This is no different in online learning. However, in digital and online learning, these lesson plans become less about the static, linear document that fulfil the need for face to face learning, and becomes a fluid and design based document that allows students (you as learners in this course) to make choices and share your ‘voice’ in a multitude of ways.
The lesson flow for this course becomes a week long plan that contains similar essential elements found in lesson plans:
- A HOOK – which could be a video, an idea, a provocation, a question; this also includes the objectives for this ‘lesson’
- DIRECT INSTRUCTION – for this course, there are few direct instructional moments that are synchronously delivered or consumed. In this course, direct instruction comes from readings, videos, podcasts, and other digital resources.
- GUIDED PRACTICE – this is primarily done in the discussions. In this course, these discussions are NOT just text based responses, but a range of text, image (eg. shoe selfie, meme, gifs), audio, video and multimodal responses. It is through these discussions, in which ever format you create, that ideas, concepts, and CDL will emerge
- INDEPENDENT PRACTICE – will be done through the tinkering with tech opportunities. While there are suggested activities written into the course schedule, you can also replace or swap a tinkering activity with another from the suggested list found on the syllabus. As long as you share your independent practice experiences in some way, within the course discussions or in your inquiry project production, you will be credited with ‘time well spent’.
- WRAP UP – this is the moment in each lesson, or each week of the course, where you reflect on what you have accomplished, and mark down on the Grade Grid that work is completed – by high-lighting each cell in the spreadsheet for the weekly tasks with a bright GREEN colour, indicating that it is completed.
