10 Uses for Old Toothpaste Tubes in Your Classroom

Although I could make a list of 10 uses for old toothpaste tubes in a classroom, I think it would be a waste of time and pretty much useless.  Afterall, I have no pedagogical need to use toothpaste tubes in my classrooms and even if I had one use for them I doubt I could think of 10 good uses.

The same goes for the “10 uses for in your classroom” blog posts and online articles.  This type of lesson or activity planning fails to accomodate good backwards design.  Backwards design is common sense to many teachers and is the foundation of course design as put forward by Wiggins and McTighe (Understanding by Design) and others.  Moreover, backwards design is an old old way to solve common engineering problems.  You need to figure out what you want to achieve, when you want to achieve it by, and who will be working on it.  From there you design backwards to your present state.

In course design the process fundamentally looks like this:

  1. Identify Desired Results
    • Determine your main goals or big ideas
    • Center your goal around an inquiry topic or essential question
    • state the learning objectives that will support the big idea or EQ
  2. Determine Acceptable Evidence
    • plan how you will assess the learning
    • create standards for the assessment
  3. Plan Learning Experiences
    • lesson plans
    • activities
    • resources required

By starting off with the “10 uses for in your classroom! the design process is reversed. It starts with the technology (the resource), suggests the use (the activity), and then leaves the teacher to decide what the learning objective will be.

It’s reasonable to think that there are times when teachers can insert a technology into an existing lesson or activity, but I think this would be pretty rare. A more commonly heard narrative in the hallways is “I need to find some good uses of ”

I also think that this is exactly how many of the “10 uses of in your classroom” articles are positioned - “Engage your students with !”

Solve a pedagogical problem with technology, don’t use it as a starting point in unit design.