Activity Types Chart Guide

What is an Activity Types Learning Chart?

The activity types learning chart is a KWL chart that provides information about what we KNOW (the six models of instructional design most often used by classroom teachers), what we WANT to know (activity types that work well for these instructional models), and what we've LEARNED from our explorations of the Activity Types Web Site.

You will use the chart as a means of preserving ideas/activities/online resources we find and use in this class for your own purposes later. Pick activities that you think you will use. Use tools that you think will be appropriate for grade level students you are interested in teaching. Use fonts, colors, and graphics that you like and want to keep!

The purpose of this assignment. . .

The purpose of this assignment is to help you explore the dozens of activity types that can be used in instruction and then provide you with opportunities to practice adapting these activity types for lesson designs. Joyce, Weil, & Calhoun (2003) describe 22 models of instruction, but with variations, these could mean hundreds of different ways to deliver instruction. However, they also comment that teachers who build a repertoire of five or six of these models of instruction demonstrate mastery at adapting lessons to meet the learning needs of multiple learning styles and special needs--a "master teacher."

Of course, the goal of this course is to help you integrate technology into instruction, so we will focus on activity types that integrate technology (just a few skills) with opportunities to examine how you would adapt those activity types for your instructional needs.

Additionally, the tech skills you will master for this assignment are the formatting skills necessary to correctly format word processing documents.

2) Step 1: Exploration of Activity Types. Do the following:

• Think about what you are asking students to DO during the lesson--use reading skills, use writing skills (to publish, to communicate), solve problems (mathematical, computational, or reasoning), or work with data (research, collect, analyze) for use as the basis of reading, writing, or solving problems. When students use these types of skills in a lesson, integrating technology works WELL!
• Check out the Activity Types Web Site at http://www.figg.com/activity_types/
• Find two activities that work well for each of the six instructional models.

3) Create your Learning Chart:

• View a sample learning chart.
• Download the checklist for the Activity Learning Chart.
• Review the basics for setting up a properly formatted word document in the viewlet called Formatting Rules (5 min)

Remember that you must have the latest Flash and Shockwave players installed to view this tutorial. (Use the links above if you need to download and install these players.)

• Download and use the print tutorial to assist you in setting up your Learning Chart.