Brittany Murray

ED508

Technology Portfolio 5E Lesson Plan Reflection

Dr. Mayben

When planning this lesson, I decided to utilize my background in History to craft a 5E

Lesson Plan on the American Revolution. I am a Pre-K teacher during the typical school year,

but I have enjoyed spending time with older kids in the summer program at a local school. In our

Pre-K classroom, the program allows a certain number of minutes to use digital technology in

our classrooms, so I am not accustomed to incorporating technology into my lesson plans on the

level this assignment required. I enjoyed the planning portion of the technology portfolio. This

project allowed me to broaden my experiences as an educator by teaching outside of my grade

and content and to become more comfortable incorporating digital resources into my instruction.

The engagement portion of the lesson included a review of the safe, ethical, and legal use

of digital devices. I highlighted the aspects of digital citizenship directly related to our project,

including cyberbullying, passwords, and plagiarism. I also explained how we would rotate

through the activities on the devices in our classroom. We then moved into the engagement

activity to introduce the topic of our lesson. For our engagement activity, I designed a game on

Kahoot! about the events leading to the American Revolution that we played as a class. The

internet went down as we were beginning, so I had to wait for the internet to reboot and restart

the game. That is why there is a glitch in the professional dispositions video, as I edited those
minutes to keep the assignment closer to the recommended time allotment. I have not used

Kahoot! in a classroom setting before, and I will consider the timer portion of the game when

utilizing the program in the future. When I created the game, I set the timer too fast on some

questions. Overall, the game proved to be an effective tool to engage the students and gave me a

good idea about their prior knowledge.

I immediately knew I had chosen the right class and activities when I played the song

“Flowers” by Miley Cyrus for our brain break. The students sang along and danced. Moving into

the engagement assessment, they latched on to the concept of “breaking up” as it relates to the

colonies breaking away from Great Britain to form their own self-governed country. Because it

is a summer program, my students are rising fifth graders and have been taught the standard in

fifth grade the previous year, but many struggled to provide key details about the Revolution. For

the assessment portion, I gave students a handout with a word bank to use as they crafted break-

up letters from the colonies to the crown. We reviewed the vocabulary in the word bank before

the students composed their letters. I planned to review the concepts but spend most of our time

on exploration and elaboration. However, due to the results of my engagement assessment, I

spent more time on the explanation portion than planned. The engagement section demonstrated

the importance of activating and assessing prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson and not

assuming competency because the material was previously taught in another grade or previous

class.

For the exploration portion, students rotated through two activities, spending 20 minutes

on each activity. The first activity utilized docsteach.org. Docsteach.org has activities for all

grade levels incorporating primary documents and images into interactive activities and games.

These activities have an assessment embedded in the activity, and the educator receives the
results by email. I found this activity challenging for the students and pressed them into the zone

of proximal development. Students engaged in an activity that allowed them to zoom in and

explore the Declaration of Independence. Using primary documents as a base to teach History is

incredibly important. Reading the actual words from the source provides insight into how the

colonies felt wronged, their philosophy of government, their tenacity to rue themselves, and the

cultural climate. Primary documents allow students to connect with the time they are studying

and ask, “How are we the same?” and “How are we different?”. Because the text on the screen is

a picture of the original Declaration of Independence, I also provided printed copies in case a

student found the script difficult to read. Students could also listen to the Declaration of

Independence, but no groups utilized this resource. When finished with the exploration, students

answered questions in the text box on the screen, and those answers were emailed to me for

evaluation. This exploration activity provided insight pertaining to student reading

comprehension and higher-order thinking. I would utilize docsteach.org in the future to

incorporate primary source documents into my planning.

During the second activity, students explored a playlist I created on YouTube specifically

for this activity. This playlist consisted of songs with themes related to freedom, breaking up,

surviving, and moving on. I tried to choose a variety of genres and pieces from different decades

to expand interest and representation. The songs echoed the colonists’ attitudes before and during

the American Revolution. Students listened to the playlist and chose their top two songs.

Following the exploration rotations, students presented their top two songs in a class discussion.

They explained why they felt the songs best represented the thoughts, ideas, and feelings of the

time using lyrical examples from the text. Students participated enthusiastically and presented

their ideas with passion and conviction. Debates ensued, respectfully, as students made their
cases for why the songs they chose represented the colonists most accurately. This discussion

proved fruitful, and the students fully grasped the philosophical reasons the colonists felt the

Revolution was the only answer. In the future, I would broaden my playlist to include more

diverse artists for representation.

Due to the results of the engage portion of my lesson plan, I adjusted to spend more time

on the explanation section of this plan. As previously stated, my students during the summer

program studied this standard during the regular school year. I assumed they would have a sound

foundational understanding of the who, what, where, when, and why behind the American

Revolution. Students had a firm grasp of the feelings behind the Revolution but lacked a

competency of the main players and important events. I created a Google Slides presentation to

guide the explanation and direct students to the learning objectives for the lesson. The Google

Slides presentation was a solid overview, giving a good jumping point for further reasoning and

details. Because students had participated in the exploration activities before the explanation

activities, I found their attentiveness and engagement increased. Students ended the explanation

portion with the “3 Cents Method” discussion. I gave each student three tokens; in this case, they

were pompoms. They went around the group choosing from the higher-order thinking questions

listed on the last slide of the presentation. After a student decided on the question to be

addressed, students who wanted to answer the question pushed a token into the center and had a

turn to talk and contribute. Then, the next person chose a new question. The process repeats until

everyone has a chance to use their three tokens. I found this strategy a great way to release the

pressure valve by giving students autonomy to choose when to participate and which questions to

answer- they felt confident in contributing their ideas. The class atmosphere was less tense, and

the mood was overall positive. Next time, I will probably give two tokens instead of three. Three
tokens stretched the activity longer than I anticipated, especially with the assessment paragraph

at the end of the activity. The paragraphs were well-thought and thorough. The assessments

showed students’ growth in understanding key events and figures leading to the American

Revolution and progression towards mastery of the objectives.

The project assessment for the Elaboration section of our lesson was a YouTube playlist

curated from the Revolution Break Up playlist they explored earlier in the exploration portion of

our study. Students circled back to the familiar playlist, took the songs they chose earlier (or

chose different songs, if they wished), and added those to a new playlist titled with their name. I

verbally instructed the class on how to do this, but I did show them on the Promethean board

after two students still didn’t understand the directions. Next time, I would begin by

demonstrating the process for creating a new playlist on the Promethean board at the start to

make the direction explicitly communicated. Once students began to work on their projects, they

chose their songs, added them to the new playlist, and wrote a short description for each song,

including a specific lyric that exemplified why they chose the song. The class enjoyed the

project, but we had to continue it the following day because they needed additional time to

complete the playlists. The example posted on the website is exemplary. The student fulfilled the

rubric and expressed ideological understanding. I think this portion of the lesson went well.

Students were very engaged and enjoyed listening to the songs. It was a creative way to

encourage higher-order thinking and application. A few students did say I was “old” because of a

few of the song choices, so I would add some newer songs to the playlist if I taught this lesson

again. Students could add their personal songs to the playlist if I first approved them, but none

opted. It may have limited their creativity to some degree by not allowing total creative freedom.

Still, YouTube is a platform that requires exploration with caution and supervision, so I felt that
having songs in a playlist to choose from limited the platform’s broader exploration in a way

appropriate for the age participating in the elaboration.

My objectives in this lesson were to ensure students will be able to determine the various

economic and ideological causes and events leading to the American Revolution by exploring

primary source documents and group discussions and that students will be able to use YouTube

to create a playlist of songs that express the sentiments behind the American Revolution, write a

description for each song detailing why they chose it, and present their work. According to the

assessments and evaluation, the lesson successfully fulfilled its objectives. I found the planned

activities engaging for the class I was instructing and that the students connected with the content

through primary source documents and applying familiar songs to the topic presented. These

connections helped students concrete terms, ideas, and events for future recall as they study the

American Revolution in further detail in the future.