Effective Lesson Plan on a Digital Platform
Among the many challenges posed by COVID-19, a major one has been in the field of education, faced by teachers, trainers, and educators across the globe. They all agree that presently the biggest challenge on a digital platform at all levels of education, has been keeping their students ENGAGED.
Attention spans across all ages and levels of education appear to be shorter on a solely digital platform, in comparison with an in-person or a hybrid model, with a mix of in-person and virtual classes.
The first step towards an effective engaging lesson plan is to chalk out the objectives of the lesson.
If the goal is to master for example the perfect tense, then activities should be supplementary to the objective and should be helpful towards its understanding, application, and production.
Some suggestions for an effective lesson plan to keep students engaged through classes, on a daily basis, are:
- Warm up should be started with a very short video on the topic of the day.
Video must be level-appropriate, short, easy to understand with many familiar words and preferably in perfect tense, so that the learners can tune in to the application of the introduced perfect tense. This could be followed by a group discussion, preferably in smaller groups in virtual break out rooms on a digital platform.
- Graphics that are related and easily understood by the learners work towards reviewing, reinforcing and applying the introduced content.
Various related images can also serve as a springboard for starting a conversation and giving an opportunity to the learners, to show off their newly acquired skill in perfect tense. In addition to the educator providing the images, students can also post related images on the digital whiteboard, thus taking ownership while running with their thoughts and ideas.
- Showing resources through share screen is another way of expanding the knowledge of the learners, walking them through various websites with handy information or activities that again can work towards keeping the students engaged with full participation.
- Group Activities in the form of role plays from real world scenario has proven time and time as an effective mode of application of newly acquired knowledge that can also show strengths and weaknesses of the learners.
- Using Templates of presentations while making good use of the white board and shared screen features of most of the offered digital platforms.
- Recording presentations of the learners on topics of their interest and listening to the recording with them, while giving them an opportunity of doing self-corrections.
All the ideas above help create a lesson plan that boosts the creativity and imagination of the students. Participating actively in all their classes, they will keep engaged!