LAMS: pre-service teachers update the old lesson plan

The value of a lesson plan as an organisational tool is highly regarded by many teacher educators but from a pre-service teacher's point of view, it often produces little more than “documentation”, hence their reluctance to undertake them. The Teacher Education Program at Macquarie University is trialling the use of LAMS software as a scaffold for lesson planning with pre-service teachers. The graphic interface allows students and their tutors to visualise lessons providing an instant “picture” of the lesson and its content with a clarity not available in traditional written lesson plans. Throughout the process of authoring a LAMS sequence, these students are required to think about all aspects of their lesson and LAMS enables them to experience the lesson themselves via a Preview mode before using it in the classroom. In addition, LAMS creates these lessons in a standardised template of activities that can easily be modified for future re-use.