Thinkfinity

=Thinkfinity= []

Thinkfinity.org makes it easy for educators to enhance their classroom instruction with lesson plans, interactive activities and other online resources. Thinkfinity.org also provides a wealth of educational and literacy resources for students, parents and after-school programs.

All of Thinkfinity.org's 55,000 standards-based K-12 lesson plans, student materials, interactive tools and reference materials are reviewed by the nation's leading education organizations to ensure that content is accurate, up-to-date, unbiased and appropriate for students.

(from http://www.thinkfinity.org/about.aspx)

=Thinkfinity Process:=

For this assignment, we were charged with the task of searching thinkfinity.org for two lesson plans that could be used as part of an instructional unit for our particular course material. The idea of the assignment was to find viable lesson plans that could be effectively placed into a pre-existing instructional unit to supplement other lesson plans that were already being used. That is, I had to find two lesson plans that could function as part of an instructional unit that is currently part of my course(s).

In order to find these lesson plans, I searched thinkfinity.org for various topics that I thought were relevant to my course material. In doing so, I have to admit that I had a very difficult time finding lesson plans would work for my subject matter. I suppose, at some level, that this is due in part to the fact that my course does not deal with your traditional academic subjects. Because of this, I think that I may have had to dig a little deeper than other students.

In the end, I selected two lesson plans that I believe are very important for freshman students going through the exploratory program at Howard High School of technology.

=Technical Literacy:=

The first Thinkfinity lesson plan that I selected is titled 'Technical Literacy'. This particular lesson plan provides students with some basic facts about technology and literacy within our country. In my instructional unit, I would use this thinkfinity lesson plan to challenge students to interpret the facts provided. I think today's students have certain preconceived notions about technology and its importance, so this particular lesson will challenge them to respond to the presented facts and explain whether the facts support thier previous ideas or refute them.



=Free Email Accounts:=

The second Thinkfinity lesson plan that I selected is titled Free Email Accounts. In this lesson plan, students are educated about free email services such as Yahoo mail. From there, they are walked through the process of signing of for a basic email account at Yahoo.com. I selected this particular lesson because I feel that it is importatn for students to garner an understanding of community in an online community and being a viable global/online citizen.



=Reflection:=

I found the Thinkfinity assignment to be interesting and think that it is something that I can use early on as a new teacher. In my mind, coming up with worthwhile lesson plans that students can benefit from is going to be one of the biggest challenges early on. That said, however, I am confident that I will be able to use lesson plans like the two that I highlighted here to reach students as I work to become more familiar with the process.

For me, this assignment was great because it gave me my first real opportunity to see a basic lesson plan laid out from start to finish. For the most part, the only experience that I had with any sort of lesson planning involved putting together lecture notes, so I think that having some experience with more interactive lesson plans will serve me well as I work to become an experienced teacher.