Abstract
This article helps classroom teachers create an “Interactive Lesson,” a self-paced, student-controlled, individualized learning opportunity embedded with assessments. These lessons are offered to learners who need individualized instruction; corrective instruction, additional practice, or enrichment activities. Interactive lessons are not new. However, the practical, sequential methodology offered herein provides a practical design model for creating and integrating Microsoft’s PowerPoint for presenting self-paced, personalized lesson content. The presentation can be captured to a floppy diskette, burned onto a CDROM, or sent as an email attachment to students in a classroom, computer lab or at home. The interactive lesson has many practical applications for students needing remedial attention or those attending cyber schools or home-bound students.
TopThe Interactive Lesson Defined
Teachers and trainers use Microsoft Word to create text-based class handouts, lesson study guides, and student workbooks based on their own classroom learning objectives. They use Microsoft’s Front Page and Netscape’s Composer to produce web-based content materials. And, they use Microsoft’s PowerPoint to create interactive presentations. Interactive Lessons take the form of a self-paced, student-controlled, individualized learning opportunities embedded with formative and summative assessments to gauge student learning outcomes. Lessons are offered to those who need individualized attention, remedial instruction, additional practice, or enrichment activities. Specifically, an Interactive Lesson:
- •
Is a visual-based, behavioral-oriented teaching strategy appropriate for learners at all levels that may benefit from concrete, graphical learning experiences.
- •
Contains self-paced instructional content appropriate for those who learn best when content is sequenced and delivered at their own pace or who need remedial instruction outside the typical classroom environment.
- •
Offers specific, logical, systematic lessons that foster individualized instruction and sequential learning.
- •
Is student-initiated and student -managed learning that places a good deal of the responsibility for mastering the material directly in the hands of the learner.
- •
Embraces all phases of the Mastery Learning instructional technique. It suggests alternatives for presenting the initial mastery objectives, corrective instruction, and enrichment activities.
TopCreating An Interactive Lesson
The ADDIE instructional system design model guides the creation of the Interactive Lesson.
For each step in the ADDIE Model, a practical, hands-on task is completed as evidence that the skill has been mastered. Here’s how it goes: (Figure 1)
Figure 1. The ADDIE model for instructional system design
- 1.
Analyze: define the needs and constraints
- 2.
Design: specify learning activities, assessment and choose methods and media
- 3.
Develop: begin production, formative evaluation, and revise
- 4.
Implement: put the plan into action
- 5.
Evaluate: evaluate the plan from all levels for next implementation; evaluation is essential after each step.
Each step has an outcome that feeds the subsequent step.