Inclusive Lesson Plans: 'Unusual Jobs'

Students will have to follow these steps to prepare the presentation (flipped classroom):

1. Find information about five interesting and unusual careers (this step will have been carried out as homework with the necessary guidance of the teacher).

2. Make slides showing a typical day for these workers (one worker per slide).

3. Share your presentation briefly with the class and talk about what each job entails (the following class).

The purpose of this activity can be explained using digital Bloom's Taxonomy:

This taxonomy modified by Andrew Churches (2008) aims to expand the 21st century thinking skills (communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking) associated with each level of this pyramid, which illustrates both lower and higher order thinking skills. Students are active participants and use technology as a means.

The use of Emaze, a Web 2.0 tool, can be supported by different levels that make up the pyramid. In this lesson, students will be using this learning tool to create a presentation.

The layers of this Taxonomy that accounts for its use are:

• Understanding: Students will be building meaning on the basis of what they have found about weird jobs for homework and also whatever they may have learned in previous lessons of this unit. In other words, students have to find information about 5 unusual jobs and be able to describe them and select relevant information/ pictures for their presentation.

• Applying: At this level students will have to apply what they have learned to create a presentation about 5 unusual jobs. In this lesson, students will have to prepare what they are going to include in each slide and also talk about each unusual job they have selected.

• Creating: This is the level where students design and create the end product. They have to work on the digital and oral presentation.

What Next

As a follow-up activity, students will be asked to work in pairs, choose one of the jobs from each others’ presentation and write a job application (which the teacher has already explained in a previous lesson). First, students will make the draft of the application. In this stage, the teacher will encourage students to use the spell checker in a word processor.

This is an instance of the SAMR model Augmentation phase since technology acts as a direct tool substitute but with some functional improvement. In this case, technology is a direct tool that substitutes a conventional way of writing a composition and adds functional improvement (Puentedura 2006). The aid of technology here provides motivation and boosts engagement.

After that, they will send the job application to the teacher's Gmail account, for a final correction.

Finally, the teacher will give students general feedback on their performance.

TPACK is another framework that helps us account for the value of this lesson plan. TPACK stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and it was written in 2006 by Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler. It is a theory that was developed to explain the set of knowledge that teachers need to teach their students a subject, teach effectively, and use technology. TPACK gives us three knowledge areas to consider: Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge. Arranging these three categories into a Venn diagram helps us to see the four areas that are created in Mishra and Koehler’s framework. The overlap of these three categories reminds us that, as teachers, we design lessons based on how students can best learn our specific course material.

In this lesson plan, students learnt about unusual jobs and vocabulary about this. That would be the Content Knowledge (CK) teachers need to have. They also used different technological tools in order to accomplish their tasks. That refers to the Technological Knowledge (TK) teachers need in order to show how the tools work to students. Finally, tasks are done communicatively and try to emulate real life situations. This approach taken by the teacher relates to the Pedagogical Knowledge (PK). These areas cannot be taken as separate parts of knowledge, given that they overlap and mix in a fashion that enhances the learning

How does the use of technology make this lesson more inclusive?

Using both Witty Comics and Emaze, visual students will benefit from the tasks since they will remember more the content than by just listening to information on the topic. Using technology in the classroom engages students and motivates them to participate, which makes learners with special educational needs feel included.

Also, students with special needs, such as children with ASD, who often have difficulty with social interaction, can present their work to both their teachers and classmates in a safe way.

*To read more about our work, please visit our PLEs: Sabrina's PLE and Valentina's PLE*