Designing online lesson plan creator for 11th grade NIS teachers

 

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Teachers always have a lot to do in short time such as reports, plans and record achievements among other school duties. According to Harrison, a time that is given to teachers to complete all matters is not sufficient and it can take most of their holiday [1]. These difficulties are topical for Nazarbayev Intellectual teachers (NIS) teachers as well. Due to the new educational program and assessment system, NIS teachers’ workload increased. Nowadays, many teachers effectively integrate their teaching with technology to get positive outcomes. According to Provenzano, lots of websites and programs can save time in preparation for lesson and successfully make education accessible for students [2]. When one of my NIS teachers, who served as a client for my ICT project, raised these issues I volunteered to help. Moreover, I decided to integrate my ICT and GPPW projects by creating an online lesson plan creator for teachers and observing its impact on teachers' teaching practice.

The purpose of the project was to determine influence of my online lesson plan creator program on NIS teachers' teaching practice. The outcomes of the research project were expected to test practical use of my program for teachers.

Literature review.

A lesson plan is a guide that teachers use during a lesson and gives an opportunity to teachers to achieve set objectives [3]. Teachers should always be ready and prepare lesson plan a few days before tomorrow's lesson. Finding effective activities and exercises while creating lesson plan could take educators' time. Earlier planning could be an effective method of saving and spending time, not in vain. Moreover, understanding of specific aims and objectives for lesson could help for teachers concentrate on more important things such as finding an activity, and it could lead to creating new ideas for lesson plan [4, p. 62].

However, during creating lesson plans, teachers may face some difficulties and cope with the problem every time when they need to teach. First of all, many educators overwhelmed with their work, because of attempting to collect a lot of data from different sources and add to the lesson plan. The over- planning of lessons could lead to planning pressure and take a lot of time of teachers [5].

Secondly, in order to be ready for lesson teachers had to make a great structured plan, which could help to get a greater result in the classroom. Considerable planning is necessary to teach substantially in the class [6, 7]. Due to different templates (special instruction for creating lesson plan) educators could create efficient lesson plans. This data could be shared among teachers and students and they were not concerned about the lack of activities and exercises.

Moreover, novice teachers mostly struggle with making lesson plans during their primary years at school. In addition, when novice teachers create efficient lesson plans (as setting a quality time and exercises) at the beginning of their teaching work, it could be formed as an effective habit until their work as a teacher [8, p. 61].

Furthermore, according to the observation of B. A. Patton, teachers were able to take most of the plans from the Internet and it did not conform to an essential requirement of school. Therefore, each plan should be checked anxiously by school department before introducing plan into the school program. Although, the Internet could be the basic source of different ideas and educator was able to take some parts of lesson plan in order to add and design their own plan [9, p. 133]. To sum up, teachers faced with such problems and I projected to solve it with the help of online lesson plan creator.

Methodology and procedure.

My program would be able to create lesson plans online and the main purpose of making such program was saving a time of teachers and giving a lot of opportunities to them. Moreover, program provided with an instruction and guide for use and the wide range of activities in order to give choice for teachers. It was decided to create a program with HTML, because it has several advantages. According to Arthur, HTML programming language was easy to use, because of its functional operation with other programs [10]. In addition, designer tool of HTML, that is CSS could simplify much of your work and styling web page [11]. All the difficulties, which mentioned above could be clarified and had a solution in online lesson plan creator.

The lesson plan creator had fields to complete according to the school short-term lesson plan format (See Figure 1). After authorization, teachers could design their lesson plans and save it as a Microsoft Office Word document.

Fig. 1. Structure of the online lesson plan

 

The program had a page with various activities that can be used in the beginning, middle or end of the lesson. Activities were briefly described, including recommended time and while creating online lesson plans teachers could select them from drop-down list (See Figure 2).

Fig. 2. Activities page

 

After designing the initial version of the program in English, I demonstrated it for several NIS teachers to test. After that, I used a semi-structured interview as the main instrument of my primary research. As the result of purposeful sampling, six teachers who spoke English took part in conversations — three female and three male educators (See Table 1). All of the educators fully answered each question and told about the problems that they usually faced while creating lesson plans. Therefore, I got teachers’ perspectives and impressions of using program and could get ideas to develop my program.

 

Table 1

Demographic information about research participants

Participants	Age	Subject	Teaching experience
Teacher 1	42 years old	Economics	17 years
Teacher 2	48 years old	English	9 years
Teacher 3	27 years old	English	6 years
Teacher 4	37 years old	Physics	7 years
Teacher 5	35 years old	English	5 years
Teacher 6	27 years old	GPPW and English	4 years

 

Results.

This section gives information on the analysis of the results and findings obtained through semi-structured interviews with teachers. The respondents mentioned several benefits of using lesson plan creator (see Table 2).

 

Table 2

Benefits of using lesson plan creator

Benefits of using lesson plan creator	Respondents
Easy to use	Teacher 2, Teacher 3, Teacher 1, Teacher 6
Structured layout	Teacher 1. Teacher 2, Teacher 6
Saves time	Teacher 2, Teacher 3, Teacher 4, Teacher 5, Teacher 6
Develop teacher’s competence	Teacher 6
Useful for novice teachers	Teacher 6
Saves paper	Teacher 3

 

Opinions of teachers were mostly similar, because several teachers mentioned the same benefits. Four teachers out of six admitted that program would be easy to use and easy to understand. For example, Teacher 2 said: «I think it is good to have all your information in one place, it will make it quicker and easier to create your lesson plan and easier for other people to understand any plan that they want to look at, because they are all generated in the same format». In addition, 3 teachers out of six insisted that the program has structured layout which was very useful. For instance, Teacher 1 mentioned: «It is easy to use, it has a structured layout and it is modelled to international standards.»

The next advantage of the lesson plan creator was that teachers might not waste time looking for different books. For example, Teacher 4 pronounced: «Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is that it saves a lot of time, I think that will be the main benefit». Teacher 6 also mentioned novice teachers who would make their lesson more creative, because they can be aware about various methods with the help of this program. In addition, he said that the program could develop teacher’ methodology as educators would be provided with different activities. Only two educators expressed a benefit that differed from other opinions. The most surprising answer for me was given by Teacher 3 who had mentioned that the program could save paper as all the planning will be done online.

Conclusion.

To sum up, all of the teachers agreed that online lesson plan creator could reduce the time for lesson planning, because all essential things were included in specific program and teachers would not need to search activities from the Internet or from other methodology books. Also, it would be useful for developing teachers’ methodology including novice educators.

Overall, all teachers were ready to use online lesson plan creator as quickly as possible, because they were highly interested in this program. I believe that my program would be useful and effective, because this plan creator could facilitate their work. The main difference between my program and other programs is that teachers will be provided with sample exercises and methodology, therefore most of teachers will prefer my website.

 

References:

 

1.                Harrison C. (2013, August 29). Assessment for learning: are you using it effectively in your classroom? Retrieved May 01, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/teacher- network/teacher-blog/2013/aug/29/assessment-for-learing-effective-classroom
2.                Provenzano N. (2015). Technology in the Classroom: a Teacher's Perspective. Retrieved January 29, 2017, from http://www.webanywhere.com/our-blog/technology-in-the- classroom-a-teachers-perspective
3.                Milkova S (n. d.). Strategies for Effective Lesson Planning. Retrieved March 08, 2017, from http://www.crlt.umich.edu/gsis/p2_5
4.                Snow D. E. (2005a, November 30). More Than A Native Speaker, Revised Edition. Basic lesson planning habits. Retrieved May 01, 2017, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED496792
5.                Sherrington T. (2013, April 08). Teachers' workload: tips on how to manage it and get a work-life balance. Retrieved March 01, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher- blog/2013/apr/08/teacher-workload-tips-manage-work-life-balance
6.                Taylor P. M. (2000). When are we ever going to use this? Lessons from a mathematics methods course. School Science and Mathematics, 100(5), 252–255.
7.                Freiberg H. J. (2002). Essential skills for new teachers. Educational Leadership, 59(6), 56–60.
8.                Snow D. E. (2005b, November 30). More Than A Native Speaker, Revised Edition. Lesson planning and Classroom Survival. Retrieved May 01, 2017, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED496792
9.                Patton B. A. (2008). Evaluation of Lesson Plans: Is the Internet Helping or Hindering the Teacher Candidate? CEDER Yearbook; 2008, p. 127.
10.            Arthur L. (2016, October 26). The Advantages & Disadvantages of Using a Web-Authoring Application. Retrieved May 03, 2017, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-using-webauthoring-application-27288.html
11.            Tailor B. (2012, November 2). Advantages of HTML5 and CSS3. Retrieved May 03, 2017, from http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/advantages-of-html5-and-css30322078#4ky8Gyx28kfImpSG.97