MultiMedia Tools: Video

Lesson Idea Name: Living vs Nonliving Things

Grade Level/Content Area: Kindergarten Science
Content Standard Addressed:
SKL1. Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information about how organisms (alive and not alive) and non-
living objects are grouped.
Technology Standard Addressed:
4- Innovative Designer
Guiding question or statement:
What are living and nonliving things, and how can we tell the difference between them?
Set a goal that you want to achieve with this plan for learning with the use of multi-media tools? Will you
use your video as a sample of what students will design or will you use the video for meaningful learning
about a topic? Be sure to mention what tool you/your students will use
My goal for my students is that they would know and understand the difference between living and nonliving
things, the tool I would use to help achieve this goal is iMovie- I would show my video that I have created on
living vs nonliving things to the class to help aid in the learning process. [IRL my video would be longer than 4
minutes just to include a longer game-portion for the kids to get to say whether the thing on the screen is
living or nonliving].

URL(s) to support the lesson (if applicable):

Bloom’s Taxonomy Level(s):

☒ Remembering ☒ Understanding ☒ Applying ☒ Analyzing ☒ Evaluating ☐ Creating

Levels of Technology Integration:

☒ Infusion Level: Students may work at a higher Bloom’s Level, but they do not have any “Voice or Choice”
during the activity and most of the decisions are made by the teacher.

☐ Integration Level: We would like to see ALL lessons/activities reach this level. The project is student-
driven. Students have “Voice and Choice” in the activities, selecting the topic of study and determining the
technology tool to demonstrate mastery of the standard. The teacher becomes more of a facilitator.
☐ Expansion Level: The projects created are shared outside of the classroom, publishing student work and
promoting authorship. This could be reached by showcasing the project on the school’s morning
newscast, posting the project to the classroom blog, or publishing via an outside source.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

By using a video as a major mode of instruction in this lesson, I am able to enhance the learning experience by
entertaining and engaging my students while they are learning as opposed to a lecture or worksheet-type
activity.
Lesson idea implementation: As you address the standards, what will students and teachers do? How will
the project be introduced? How long will it take to complete? How will student learning be assessed? How will
the final product be used to inform/differentiate learning? How will you extend the student learning to a higher
learning level? How will you conclude the lesson? How will you provide feedback to students about their
work? Be sure to respond to each question appropriately.

This lesson will first be introduced via a class discussion. I will pose the essential question: what are living and
nonliving things? How can we tell the difference between them/how can we know if something is living or
nonliving? As the discussion carries on, and students offer their ideas, I will be filling out a KWL (Know, Want
to know, Learned) chart of their thoughts and ideas whether they are correct or not. Next, I will ask them,
TFrazier, 2021
 MultiMedia Tools: Video

“what do you want to know about living and nonliving things?” and I will continue to fill out the chart. After
the discussion is over, we will watch the video on living and nonliving things and play the mini-game at the
end [IRL the mini-game would be longer than 3 questions and I would split the class into teams to make it
more of a competition and thus more fun/engaging for the students]. After the video and the game, we would
continue our discussion from earlier and we would review what was written in the ‘know’ section of the chart.
We will put a green checkmark next to the thoughts and ideas that were correct, and a red X next to the
thoughts and ideas that ended up not being correct. Then I would pose the question: “what did you learn?” and
I would write down what my students said. After this, I would pull out another anchor chart and create a chart
labeled Living vs Nonliving, and my students and I would become scientists and go out on a mission to find
living and nonliving things around our school (inside and outside). After we got back to the classroom, my
students would go back to their desks and on blank copy paper draw some of the living and nonliving things
they saw during the mission, and cut them out. Then we would- as a class- decide if the item was living or
nonliving- and glue it on the chart where it belongs. This lesson will take 30 minutes to complete and learning
will be assessed through the mini game and class participation. I could extend the student learning to a higher
level by allowing the students to “collect samples” of one nonliving item while out on their field mission and
bring it back to class and we could have a discussion on how we know that the samples are nonliving.
Importance of technology:
Using video in this lesson plan is important because it engages and entertains the students while they are
learning. Other technology that I could see myself using in this lesson would be PowerPoint- I could make the
mini-game longer and have the PowerPoint going on the board and the kids in teams like I stated earlier. I
could also see myself making a Jeopardy (which I do for my tutoring students with their vocab), and I could
insert pictures of living and nonliving things. I think it would also be fun to invest in classroom buzzers (like
gameshow buzzers) for the teams to use. All this technology would entertain and engage my students
because they are playing a game that is helping them learn and practice what they have learned.
Internet Safety and Student Privacy:
The only issue I could see in this lesson regarding internet safety and student privacy was if a student wanted
to watch the video or play the games more when they got home- it would be important that I make those
resources easily accessible to them in safe corner of the internet such as our class blog, rather than the
students trying to find it themselves on YouTube and risk them stumbling across something they shouldn’t be.
Making sure these videos, games and other technological resources are available in a safe manner for my
students would alleviate parent and administrator stress regarding students accessing the internet to search
for something that could lead to dangerous websites.
Reflective Practice: After designing this lesson idea, how do you feel the activities you created could impact
student learning? What could be done to further extend the lesson?
I believe that the lesson I have designed is fun, entertaining, engaging and effective, and that it will have a
positive impact upon my student’s learning experience. My lesson allows for collaboration and the sharing of
ideas which engages active-learning, my video will positively impact my visual learners and allow them to
better understand the concepts. My lesson also allows for an opportunity to leave the classroom and make
real-world connections between what we have learned in the classroom and what we see outside of it for my
tactile learners, and it allows for my creative students to get to illustrate what they have learned in their
drawings. To further extend the lesson, while my students were out on their mission, they could “collect
samples” of nonliving things in Ziploc baggies to bring back to the class, and we could examine them under
the microscope (document camera) as a class and determine some characteristics about the sample that
prove to us that it is nonliving.

TFrazier, 2021