Technology is a great resource for Family and Consumer Sciences. To enhance and make financial education more tangible I will use curriculum online like Everfi to compliment traditional lessons. This curriculum takes financial decision making, banking topics, credit cards and insurance topics and helps to break them down to an appropriate level for any grade level. Using tools like Google Classroom will also help to create a collaborative environment in the classroom, help keep students organized and will aid creativity and originality as well as digital citizenship and 21st century skills. As for nutrition, culinary, sewing and textiles technology can be used to bring in real world issues, culture and to discover career paths in these areas. Family and Consumers Sciences is a career and technology education curriculum in general without obvious technology such as computers. Different appliances like blenders, stoves, sewing machines and other devices we will use all help students develop patience, time management skills, perseverance, confidence and make students feel a sense of accomplishment. So in short I will use technology to help students feel like they have accomplished something as well as to help them learn content and concepts.
Techniques used in the classroom
Lecturing is necessary to my teaching. However, I believe family and consumer sciences should be a largely hands on curriculum. Learning how to sew, learning how to cook healthy food, learning how to analyze meals, fabrics, textiles, food science and real life money problems all require an environment that supports experimentation. Being able to touch, observe, taste and create objects to understand concepts is a big part of why this curriculum is so important. This will be good for forming 21st century skills and life skills. So student and teacher led experiment and lab activities will be a large part of the curriculum and instruction.
