Support+Your+Trainees

= Put on your “trainer hats” again and think for a minute about your experience creating a customized Integration Plan. = Explain why it is important for educators to not only be able to locate Thinkfinity’s resources, but also to be able to think critically about how to use them to support student learning. Why is it important for teachers to create a customized Integration Plan?

Enter your name a hyphen then your answer, as I did below: Lillian - These Integration Plans become ready made lesson plans for teachers to show how their students are learning the standards they are required to teach.

Sherry - a resource is only as effective as the instructor who uses it. A teacher should consider how to best use a resource to support student learning BEFORE using it. Finding a 'great' resource and using it without forthought is inviting problems. An integration plan would help a teacher plan ahead and anticipate problems. I like the fact that it expects the teacher to do a trial run of the resource. I was able to get a better sense of how to best use the resource for my particular age group.

Karen-I think it is important for teachers to be able get to and use this type of resource because it gives them a wide variety of uses that may be used in the classroom. This site has worked well for me when I wanted to add something more to a lesson. I enjoy finding interactives especially for math that go along with my lessons that the students can use when they have completed their assignments to strengthen their skills. I think the Integration Plan is important because teachers really have to think about how they want to use this information for the benifits of the students.

Julia - Offering Thinkfinity as a resource is wonderful; however, as we all have experienced, teachers must think critically about how they will be used. Teachers must consider their scope and sequence, state standards, district guidelines, engagement, and Bloom's taxonomy. As I discovered, the lessons weren't always as I could use them in perfect form, as I had to elements and add other activities to link to the final assessment. Because the site doesn't contain every lesson known to man, teachers must think critically to ensure all preceding and following lessons meet the intended objectives. As a trainer, it is essential to complete a customized integration plan because the trainer needs to navigate, troubleshoot, and work with standards to truly understand what they are training teachers to do. Working through their own challenges, the trainer is better able to guide and assist the teachers they train.

Dena-I feel that it is important for a teacher to complete a customized Integration Plan so that they can look at the lesson and make sure that they are includeing all of the standards that are connected with the concept that they are teaching. It also gives the teacher a direction in which the lesson should flow. It gives the teacher an opportunity to look at all of the resources available to them so that all of the different learning styles will be included in the lesson so as to include all of the students.