When I first saw the demonstration about Lesson Writer in our last class, I thought “It is amazing!” There are several advantages of the Lesson Writer. First, it is free. Secondly, it can create customized lesson plans, including exercises on vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation as well as comprehension, according to the text we copy and paste into the Lesson Writer. Therefore, it can save teachers’ a great amount of time spent on looking for the definition of new vocabularies and designing the plan.
When I came home, I couldn’t wait to introduce this web to my roommates, who are also my former colleagues when I taught EFL in China. However, after I enthusiastically opened the webpage and pasted a paragraph into it, the Lesson Writer didn’t work. It froze up! I didn’t know it was because something was wrong with my internet connection or the technology was not mature.
However, it is a great concept. It would be greatly helpful to teachers especially when they only have limited time to prepare for their lessons. But the concern I have is that even when the Lesson Writer works well, can it replace teachers’ efforts to give an efficient lesson? Not really. The teachers still need to come up with their own ideas, think of their own sample sentences which relate the students’ situations and design some meaningful and interesting classroom activities. Without real efforts, we can not be an effective teacher even when we have access to many powerful tools.
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"can it replace teachers’ efforts to give an efficient lesson? Not really."
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. Although using it can save us teachers a lot of time and efforts but I still believe teachers should play the major role not the computer...let alone the instability of technology! I have lost my file many times because my computer got crashed..
Hi Xiaoyan
ReplyDeleteYour blog is very interesting. I am enjoying reading your past posts and looking forward to new ones.
As the developer of LessonWriter.com, I am very sorry that my system that system did not perform as expected, and appreciate your graciously acknowledging that it may have been your connection. We do respond to all tech support requests promptly and really appreciate the help with debugging.
As a working teacher (20 hours of adult ESL in NYC) I assure you that LessonWriter is NOT intended to replace teachers, it is only meant to make possible what has previously been merely required: Science teachers are held accountable for teaching science content to students who cannot read, and math teachers are expected to support literacy without the training or the time. Both benefit from LessonWriter's ability to quickly and easily implement ESL or literacy support. (please see this article: http://professionallearningboard.com/k12blog/?p=385).
I hope you noticed that our custom dictionaries allow you to write definitions and sample sentences that fit your students, and since you can create an unlimited number of dictionaries you can use different examples for different student populations. And did you see the differentiation groups that allow you to target the questions to specific groups of students? That you can print the same lesson with different graphic organizers? These tools are meant to empower teachers, not replace them.
Please watch our recent 4-minute video on teacher collaboration. I think it may convince you that LessonWriter has an important contribution to make in helping all of your students succeed. http://lessonwriter.com/Training/NoAdminLeftBehind/NALB.aspx
LessonWriter is to teachers as electric dishwashers and microwave ovens are to great chefs.
Thanks very much for listening and please give LessonWriter another try. I believe it will support your own efforts as a teacher, and support you in serving your students.
Stephen Churchville
stephen@LessonWriter.com