Hi Breanne, Molly, Sarah, and Mickayla,
Thanks so much for sharing your interactive learning resource! I really enjoyed reading through the mini unit you put together, and took a lot of good info and ideas away from it.
As I worked my way through the resource, a couple points came up that I thought would be worth sharing:
Worksheets
Assuming that this is a resource to be shared with colleagues or other teachers, it would be helpful to have the worksheets displayed as a full page, perhaps as appendices, so that they are easily printable/photocopiable. The worksheets themselves look great, especially the “Create your own monster” one, but are not very user friendly at their current size.
If these are worksheets that you’ve created, it’s also worth being mindful that they will likely be printed or photocopied in black and white so some of the pictures may not show up as well.
Tech Resources
Speech-to-text offers a great option to help meet the needs within your learning contexts and for those students who prefer to use it. The rationale for this tech choice is well thought-out and makes sense.
I do have trouble seeing how Education.com fits meaningfully within the lesson, though. In the rationale, your group mentions that games through this site will prompt engagement and offer practice, but other than using this as an “extra” for when learners are finished with their tasks, I don’t see anywhere else that this fits into the lessons. If games provide intrinsic motivation and get learners to better engage with the content (Why Games?. n.d.), it could be an idea to add them in as a more substantial part of a lesson.
Additionally, browsing through Education.com I can see that it has tons of fabulous content, so maybe offering links to a few suggested games or interactive resources that you feel fit best into the unit would help make more sense of this technology choice.
Learning Outcomes & Assessment
In terms of learning outcomes, all of the goals identified look realistic and fitting in relation to the subject matter. When translating these into the assessments, I’m not able to see where learning outcome #1, “Students will be able to effectively identify descriptive language in text”, is being represented or assessed at all. It would be worth adding a quick description in the assessment portion of your document to mention how this would be done, or taking look at it from the Backwards Design framework to see where it could fit into the lesson.
Overall, this was a thorough and useful resource for what sounds like a fun lesson. Thanks again for sharing!
References
Why games? University of Toronto Libraries. (2021, January 2). https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=448614&p=3505475