First Lesson Ever + Blendspace

This upcoming Monday I will be teaching my first lesson ever to a group of sophomores. I'm nervous, but excited, and I'm on the way to being pretty thoroughly prepared.The lesson is on two different concepts/skills: what makes a good research question and how to use the internet to find good sources for a research paper. I have spent a lot of time in the past few weeks looking through websites, PDFs, images and videos on these topics and I have compiled them into a Symbaloo, which I've embedded onto my website. I was having trouble figuring out how I wanted the lesson to be structured, so, despite the fact that I really didn't want to use a Power Point, I went ahead and created a Google Presentation on the two concepts, with links to outside sources that we'll explore together as a class and in small groups, and embedded it onto my website. I also created a WebQuest and a Google Form for students to fill out their answers on the website.

I hope it's not too much information to be delivered in a mini-lesson. I also hope that the students will really pay attention once they have their laptops out and not get distracted. We'll see what happens!

I'm really glad that I've been able to use many of the tools we were introduced to in Methods & Ed. Tech class to create this lesson. Speaking of tools...

While looking through the main Pinterest board for educators I discovered BlendSpace. BlendSpace allows teachers to create lessons and quizzes that their students can access all from one link. I was able to view one of the sample lessons, on photosynthesis, and really did like what I saw. Basically it looks like you can have six components for a lesson. For the photosynthesis lesson, the teacher's first component was a video, the second was a diagram, the third was a PDF of a worksheet, the fourth and fifth were diagrams, and the sixth was another video (he didn't incorporate a quiz). Students can leave comments on any one of the components. I thought this was a great way of visually organizing all the information students will need to know for a particular lesson/unit. I'm thinking about trying this out for my second lesson, on Nov. 3rd!