The process of creating a multimedia lesson plan was nothing short of labor of love for me. I grew up in a tech savvy world, where clicking a mouse, snapping a picture with a digicam, and creating movies on the pc have become innate tasks for me. I am no stranger to designing websites because I have been fuddling with hypertext markup language (html) and designing cascading style sheets (css) since middle school. I would spend long afternoons gazing into a page filled with code to a website I created from scratch. So, imagine to my delight when I discovered that my assignment for the week was to do the things that I did for fun. Deciding on content was a walk in the park because early on our class had plenty of time to brainstorm for a lesson plan topic. Of course, since I am a future educator of history I just had to incorporate a lesson which featured a topic I old very near and dear to my heart --the African Slave Trade.
Creating a lesson plan using the ASSURE plan the second time around took one sitting because I
had already laid out the framework for my lesson during the brainstorm hour. I had decided to use a video (created by me) on the four functions of the Slave Trade, a digital camera for creating tableaus (free frame pictures of scenes), the video editing software "iMovie" or the pc version Windows Movie Maker to create picture slideshow stories, a computer & projector as a way to present the slideshows to the class, and an accompanying lesson website to supplement the entire endeavor, to span the scope of all the multimedia tools used in the lesson. Truthfully, the lesson that I had concocted was very ambitious however, I believed it would work out pretty well.The standard that fits my multimedia lesson from the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS*T) is part IV A under Assessment and Evaluation. It is to use technology resources to collect and analyze data, interpret results, and communicate findings to improve instructional practice and maximize student learning (2002). Students learn the material and gather knowledge from watching the video that I had created and developing their own versions of the stages of the African Slave Trade.
Translating the lesson plan into a website was a breeze, while trying to enhance the look & style of the website was another story. One night I tried vigorously to "hack" googlepages in order to fulfill my desire to change my website template background however, by the end of the night I just resorted to using one of their own templates so that the scripts on my website would not go haywire, which then would impair my students from accessing the website itself. I figured my slide picture presentation in the home page was enough to do creativity any justice.
Integrating multimedia into a lesson plan is a process that should help aid educators and not
make the process more complex. As a future educator, I believe that if I had not become well-versed in using multimedia tools when I was younger that it would be a challenge for me to include multimedia into my future lessons. It is imperative for all teachers, incoming or present, to become aware of the technology that is right under their fingertips. There are plenty of tools out there that are user-friendly, that are easy to use and the word that teachers all over the world like to hear -- FREE! It's all about taking the initiative to seek out these tools for use in the classroom.I duly enjoyed creating my multimedia lesson plan, as well as designing a website for it. Before I would design websites for fun and for dispersing information to my classmates (like lecture notes for a history class). But now i have learned to integrate my teaching lesson plans and making them come alive using multimedia tools as well as technology tools.
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