Mr. Patrick Malley

Online Lesson Plans

I’ve finally gotten my “lesson plan weblog” working properly, so I thought I’d share the details for any other geeky teachers.

This entire site is run on Expression Engine, which is basically a flexible content management system with support for multiple blogs and templates. Using this system, I’ve created a separate weblog for each of my three preps - Intro Psychology, AP Psychology, and U.S. History. Those weblogs contain categories for all of my academic units.

I’ve created custom form fields for each blog entry that consist of the day of the lesson, objectives, materials, anticipatory set, procedures, practice, and assessment. Basically, I’ve created a separate field for each essential element I want to include in my plan. Since not every lesson requires each of these fields, the template uses conditionals to display only those fields that contain text.

The real benefit of this system is that I now have an online form that I can use to create my plans. For example, on a Sunday night, I can sit with my laptop and outline my plans for class the next day. Those plans are then saved, organized, and published to the web where I’m able to find them and share (with co-workers, administrators, the world) whenever needed.

The front-end of these plans is organized by course, then category (academic unit), then lesson. As long as I fill out each form field properly when creating my plans, the system organizes itself automatically.

Of course, I’m leaving out a lot if technical detail to all of this. In total, I’ve put about 20 hours into creating this new system from top to bottom. In the end, though, I think I’ve created a system that will save me a great deal of time and effort.

Blogging in the Classroom

I decided this morning on my drive to work that it’s time I get my Introductory Psychology students blogging about stuff they learn in my class. The goal is to get them to think about psychology on their own terms.

Over the course of the next 15 week semester, they have to blog 10 times about something we discussed in class. There won’t be any prompts or specific assignments. I just want them to write about stuff that interests them in a space available for public viewing. As we move through the semester, and I learn more about their commitment to this project, I may tighten these rules.  However, since an underlying goal of the project is to encourage authentic exploration of interest, I want to keep things pretty open.

This morning, I asked students to create a free blog on Blogger.com. I briefly went over the signup process on the overhead in class, then we went down to the computer lab to set things up.

I now have an inbox full of emails from students with links to their blogs. I plan to follow them all via RSS, grading their participation and commenting when appropriate.

Now, I just need to create a grading rubric for their posts and see what happens.

Time for a Refresh

With all the enthusiasm of a teenage girl deciding the perfect background for her Myspace page, I’m happy to introduce the fourth redesign for this site in five years.

I purchased this domain with the intent of offering course content on the web. Two weeks before class started my first year teaching, I stumbled upon Moodle, the course management system that I would eventually implement districtwide and build a business around.

Well, now that the district uses Moodle and I’ve started a proper blog, this site has failed to serve a practical purpose for some time. Nevertheless, I’ve been unable to get rid of it. Past students always know where to find me. Google seems to find me here quite well, too. And, I’ve always thought the domain had a good professional appeal for an educator.

Thus, let me introduce, Mrmalley.com 4.0 - a repository for my lesson plans, professional resume, and thoughts about class and learning, in general. I can’t promise that the site will be updated too frequently, but I do hope to keep it as current as I possibly can.

For the geeks in the audience, I’ve built the new site on Expression Engine, my absolute favorite content management system of all time. While the details of how the lesson plan pages will look and function are still to be determined, I can say this: once set-up, writing lesson plans will be as easy as filling out an online form. I’m pretty excited about this, so I’m sure I’ll write about it more when I have it running.

Other than that, I fully realize the links to the right don’t yet go anywhere. I’ve already spent two hours I didn’t have getting this far. I’ll have to steal some time to finish from another day.