Ch. 4--Introducing the Ten-Minute Lesson Planner

Project-based learning activities can be a very effective tool for teaching information literacy skills, across all subjects and at any grade level. Planning and implementing a project-based learning activity, however, can be an overwhelming task. The teacher must have specific learning objectives in mind, and create an authentic project to achieve those goals. The potential benefits of this type of learning experience can be easily lost if the teacher has not carefully considered the methods to be used for student learning and assessment. The ten-minute lesson planner is a tool designed to help teachers quickly and efficiently integrate curriculum content with the 5As (asking, accessing, analyzing, applying, assessing) in order to create a technology-rich project. The tool, as well as the 5As, can be applied to any subject at any grade level, and together they provide teachers with a way to ensure that "all criteria for learning information literacy skills are addressed" (Jukes, 2000). When the tool has been completely filled in, the teacher has a clear picture of the content to be taught, the objectives to be met, and the methods the students will use to ask a question, access and analyze information, and apply it to the question. The lesson planner also allows the teacher to establish how student learning will be assessed at the end of the project. At a glance, both the content and the process skills for the lesson are visible.

References

Jukes, I., Dosaj, A., Macdonald, B. (2000). net.savvy: Building information literacy in the classroom (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc.