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.