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Welcome to my blog!
This blog will be primarily aimed at innovative educational techniques but will however have the occasional post about education in general.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Why do I have to post daily objectives?

Why do I have to post daily objectives on a board in my classroom? In another brilliant article by Mr. Grant Wiggins he addresses the, well, absurdity of such practice being made a policy!  In his article, "Mandating the daily posting of objectives, and other dumb ideas" he does a fantastic job of pointing out how this policy really does not help the students.  I have heard other teachers discuss how during a post conference of an observation that the teacher needs to post the daily objectives on the board and refer to them constantly during the lesson.  Not just remind the students but to physically go to the board and tap on it!!!  Really?!?!  I entered into a discussion with this supervisor to ask him why such a practice is nescessary.  His reply, (I am paraphrasing here) "When I taught, the tapping on the board would draw the attention of the auditory learner and my movement to the board would help the kinesthetic learners.  Having the objectives posted would keep us on track....."   Really?!?

So, how does this apply to Educational Technology?  Mr. Wiggins offers the answer:  Use Google Docs to share the objectives with the students!!!  By doing so, the students will always have them, they could actually take notes write on the document so they can keep the information they are learning connected to the objective they are to learn!!!

I post a brief version of my lesson plans on my website.... I am considering sharing them with all my students that way they will have a readily available document with the learning objectives.  Better yet, I could use gClass folders, put a copy of the objectives in their folders.......  (More on how to do this in another post one day!!)

Any way, what do you think?  Should the objectives be posted in the classroom?