Second Lesson: Patriotic Symbols

This lesson went pretty well. We were able to convey a large amount of content to students via the website that I constructed. Students seemed to respond pretty well to the technology. We created a website that was organized in the integrative lesson plan format so that students first examined facts about each individual patriotic symbol and then viewed facts about all four symbols side-by-side. Our formative assessment for this lesson was a worksheet that asked students to select and report on their favorite of the four patriotic symbols we studied. A number of students listed interesting and new facts that we introduced during this lesson as reasons for their choice of favorite. These responses gave us a sense that we had succeeded in conveying much of the information.

However, the one issue with this lesson was that the website, though engaging and new to students, was not interactive. Because of this, much of the lesson had students doing little to no work other than listening or reading. To avoid this disengagement in the future we designed a fill-in-the-blanks note-taking worksheet to compliment our website. This way, students will be actively listening and "taking notes" as they navigated through the website.