For our lesson, my partner and I combined ideas from both English/Language Arts and Social Studies for a combined lesson plan about skills such as annotating and summarizing to be used on a historical document. In this lesson, we begin with a slideshow presentation to guide through the basics of annotating a text, as well as using those annotations to create a sufficient summary. After these introductions, the students will go on to read and annotate Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech. The final assessment associated with this lesson is a short 6-8 sentence summary of the text, to be graded on grammar and spelling as well as the quality of the summary based on the lesson. We included four educational technology tools as formative assessments throughout the lesson, which include EdPuzzle (as an introduction to making a summary), Blooket (as a review of summary components and uses), Kahoot (as a review of all lesson components at the conclusion), and FigJam (as a group discussion board).
My partner and I took several steps to make our cross-curriculum lesson exciting and easy to learn. We started by choosing slides from SlidesGo to grab the students' attention. We decided to mix History and English to teach summarizing and analyzing together. We began by teaching how to break down a text and take notes and finished by working through how to summarize. To keep students engaged, we used several educational technology tools. We started the summarizing portion of our lesson with an edpuzzle to familiarize the students with the topic. Edpuzzle is an excellent resource for introducing topics and allowing the students to get a foundation for the topic by interacting with a video. Next, we used Blooket as a formative assessment after completing the summarizing portion of the lesson. Blooket is a resource that can be used to assess the student's level of understanding. Finally, we ended our lesson with a Kahoot review to assess the level of understanding among the students again. Kahoot is another great tool that can help educators see where their students stand on a topic. The last interactive tool we used was FigJam. We used FigJam to allow the students to collaborate and share their thoughts through a prompt. The interactive tools we used help educators engage their students in the lesson and make learning fun!