For our service learning project, we taught a lesson about apps that can be used to fight childhood obesity by promoting nutrition and fitness. Teaching this lesson taught me a few valuable lessons about planning my lessons in the future.
In general, I think that using service learning is a good technique for teaching about issues. Service learning is a great way to tie an issue to the more textbook-based lessons in class. For example, the topic of childhood obesity can also be tied to other science subjects.
In the future, it might be useful to try to tie this into a broader unit in science on nutrition or the human body. I think in the future, putting this lesson into a context with something in the science textbooks might help make it seem more applicable to students. I can see how this might be harder to teach than more traditional lessons, but because of the way that service learning can provide real world applications to classroom lessons, I think I would want to try incorporating these lessons early in my teaching career.
In terms of teaching this for a methods course, I think that it might be helpful to try to tie everything into one initial news article. News articles seem like they could be a good hook for classes, and I feel like I need more practice in picking out good hooks that are interesting but do not take too much time out of the lesson.
Personally, the biggest lesson I learned from teaching our lesson with iPad apps to the class is that technology always needs to be tested in advance. Even though the classroom was equipped to display iPad screens, new Apple products have the lightning connector instead of the older wider connector that is on older iPads, iPods, and iPhones. Because of this change, the iPad where I had some paid apps, like Smash Your Food, and our presentation slides, could not be shown on the screen.
