Mid-Planning

Dave and I found it most helpful to meet a couple of times in order to plan out our unit and divide up the responsibilities. At our latest meeting, we mapped out the big picture of our unit and filled out the planning sheet online. In filling this out, many different tasks that needed to be accomplished came to light. We decided to divide the tasks up among us based on our backgrounds and expertise. I am taking on the responsibility of the lessons and tasks involved in the media center and that have to do with technology, whereas Dave is focused more on the classroom lessons and rubric creation. However, it's hard to truly divide up tasks since we are collaborating on the project and both welcome each other's thoughts and ideas. Dave found the academic and technology standards which related to our big topics of the lesson, while I worked on assessment ideas for those benchmarks at our last meeting. Dave will also be compiling some of the classroom lessons, while I am compiling lessons which will be completed in the media center.

We will both be involved in the process of creating a rubric to measure the standards assessed in this unit. For the assessment rubric, we plan on looking at the individual technology and language arts standards and then creating descriptors which will be listed on a rubric with four performance categories. The rubric will measure the students' performance on their final presentations as well as their researching skills throughout the lessons.

A constant struggle for all educators I think is finding enough time to do a task completely. That was probably the one struggle for Dave and I these last few weeks; finding a chunk of uninterrupted time in which to plan and work on the unit. We were both procrastinating, however, once we just sat down and did it, it was a good feeling. It's always nice to get feedback from someone on an idea and it was great to have two minds thinking together in order to develop ideas and lessons for the unit.