LessonUp Academy
lesson plan

How to structure your LessonUp lesson

LessonUp is not only the tool to create your lessons, it is also the place to get inspiration on teaching and learning techniques. In this module you get some tips on how to structure your LessonUp lesson.

We simply devide the structure into 4 parts:
  • Learning objectives
  • Activate prior knowledge
  • Content & interaction
  • Exit tickets

🎯 Learning objectives

Setting expectations for students is the starting point for a succesful lesson. How the learning objectives are formulated is a personal choice, but formulating a learning objective from the student perspective is often more powerful: You can..., or: I can...

Learning objectives are also often formulated at the beginning of your book. You can use these as the basis for your LessonUp lesson. You'll see that such learning objectives can be quite general. That's not a problem, but sometimes you may need to be more specific in the wording.

💡 Activate prior knowledge

Activating prior knowledge is not only a fun energiser, it also ensures that students are more engaged with the lesson. With the interactive mindmap, students can enter answers via their device.

Together with the students, you can make the answers appear one by one, or all at once. This allows you to make an immediate assessment of their prior knowledge. Check out the video to see how it works.

🖼️ content & interaction

- Static slides
Static slides are used to transmit information. It is recommended to use a maximum of 20 slides per half hour. It is possible to have text 'fly in'. In this way, students are not overwhelmed with information all at once, but you can make it appear step by step.

- Images
An image can be very effective in your lesson. It can speak to the imagination, which increases the attention span. Which images you use depends very much on the learning objective. Two tips we can give: use as many rights-free images as possible and choose relevant images.

- Videos
If you use a video from YouTube or Vimeo, it's a good idea to embed it in LessonUp. This way you can enter a start or stop time, or even make it interactive. This allows you to add questions to the video.

- Interactive elements
As with offline learning materials, such as textbooks, you need enough exercises to help students retain the material. In LessonUp, there are several interactive parts you can use for these exercises: quiz, mindmap, open question and drag & drop question. For all these parts, students can participate with their own device.

🎫 exit tickets

Simply setting a learning goal is not enough. A learning objective is only meaningful if it is repeated at the end of the lesson. You might notice that a learning objective formulated by the teacher is not necessarily the learning objective of all students.

The two most common lesson elements in LessonUp are two open-ended questions:
  • "Write down three things you learned this lesson."
  • "Ask one question about something you haven't understood very well yet."

time to practice!

This lesson contains examples of learning objectives, different content types and exit tickets. Please scroll through the lesson and/or save it to your account to use it at a later moment.