Education 539: Technology Planning for Educational Environments

A course designed to assist educators in developing a comprehensive plan for the integration of technology into the teaching/learning process. Learners will research a broad range of existing and emerging technologies and their applications in a learning environment as well as the constructs of the technology planning process. This research will then be applied to formulating a classroom level technology plan.

Within the Gr.12 Biology curriculum there is a component on how organisms have changed in the past.  This unit has always been a problem for me as it is one of the last units that I teach, and often I don't have enough time to do the unit justice.  I try and eleviate the time crunch, I have been using a site from Horton High School that put their Evolution unit online.  Unfortunately, the resources that were provided, I found a bit lacking.  Dead links, and ambiguous questions often made this unit worse to administer than teaching the unit myself.  This past semester I vowed to my students (after numerous complaints) that I would rework the unit.  When asked to complete a website for my own course at Cape Breton University, I thought that his would be the perfect venue. 

Students are constantly bombarded with new and interesting information all of the time.  YouTube, Facebook and MSN Messenger are all popular and enjoyable activities for most of my students.  Why can't we harness this desire to teach biology?  That is the intent of the Evolution and Natural Selection website.  It uses streaming video, interactive flash activities, audio, and Powerpoint to teach the basic concepts of evolution.  It is deliberately structured in a linear and easy to use format so that students will not get confused or lost.  The assignments are clearly labeled and student expectations are also clearly defined.  The site is linked to my main Biology page so that it is easy to find and students can work on their own, at their own pace.  The site was designed in Dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression Web with snippets of code from a number of different resources.

PDFYou can view the site here.