Hi Ernie,
Thank you for sending me the link to LessonLAMS.com, I spent sometime browsing the site yesterday and will spend some more time later this week.
I am working on a "proof of concept" solution to use technology for lesson/curriculum design. One of the items that I have lot of emphasis is - Integration of lesson design - Design it once and use it in multiple ways e.g. one of the use could be to incorporate cross-curriculum features.
I will be using "Atomic Physics" to develop pedagogical strategies and lesson designs/plans for grade levels 1 - 12. This design will be a collaborative effort of respective teachers and some students as well.
Lesson plan for the 11th grade atomic physics will directly refer to the competencies that get "emphasized" in grades 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9 of science, math, English and environmental studies classes.
In other words lesson plan for 11th grade "atomic physics" will have (by design) top-down and bottom-up tentacles through lesson plan of other subjects and grades.
So far my steps are focused in:
1. I am creating pedagogical templates with notebook, data-collection, forum, shared resources etc. that would be included in the "support activities" so they are available to the teachers as they work together in discussing and designing their curriculum/lesson-plans.
2. The "support activities" mentioned above will be a included into master learning design. The design workspace will have multiple tracks where the lesson design activities will take place as "RUNNING A LESSON" with the teachers being actual learners while collaborating on providing the design deliverables. There will be at least one track each for the grades involved led by one teacher per grade/subject.
Note: There are many other/better ways of doing the collaborative design work, but the more the teachers work on LAMS, I believe we will create better lessons for the learners - Its kinda role play in reverse.
3. How to modularize the designs on the tracks and move them off the the LAMS workspace as a set to make room for the next set.
I believe that I have got most of flow figured out, but I don't yet have handle on a clean way of selectively saving part of the designs (outside of deleting the rest and saving what is needed). Since this may be done hundreds of time or more, I would like to make it more professional (i.e. without having to save hundreds of iterations). I must explore other ways of making this selective transfer from the workspace to saved design.
Do you have any suggestions/comments on selective save/transfer of design from the workspace to saved/exported designs. Also, a database schema can be very helpful, Is one available.
Pardon me for the (maybe convoluted) details, I just wanted let you know my brainstorming as a teacher on potentially using LAMS. I am certainly open and looking forward to listen to another perspective.
Regards,
Posted by Afroze Fatima Abidi
