Business Education Lesson Plan, Web Page Lesson Plans

Q: I'm looking for a comprehensive lesson plan on building a web page for students grades 9-12. We use Dell laptops and a wireless mobile lab; this is an alternative school and the kids have just a basic understanding of computers.

A:You can check out Emerald Ridge High School's Web Design Course. I asked permission from the instructor, Jim Myerhoff, to use some of the materials and ideas from the course. I found the materials and course design very useful and helpful in designing our web page design course. The website address is: http://jagweb.puyallup.k12.wa.us/ I am currently sharing any materials or ideas we have come up with J. Myerhoff. If you find any other resources or ideas, we would certainly welcome collaborating with you. Craig Nansen's recommendation about using google or some other search engine (though google gets the highest ratings these days) to find subject area and age appropriate lesson plans makes a lot of sense. I have a website that links to lesson plan databases, too--along with about a gzillion others, but who has time to go through them all? Using a favorite one--like the ERIC database, which is one of the best--still leaves you wondering if maybe there're some better lesson plan amongst the untold thousands (soon to be hundreds of thousands) elsewhere. For example, I just did a search using the search string "lesson plans" and "respiratory system". I got over 1000 hits! Next I did a search on "lesson plans" and "dinosaurs", and, as you might expect, I got over 20,000 hits!!! Now this is information overload, right? But it's better than searching relatively blindly through one lesson plan database after another. This is because google ranks web sites and presents the best (most used or visited) sites first. Let google do the walking for you. It definitely works. Don't get me wrong. The lesson plan databases are important. Folks like me and ERIC and GEM and technet.com, etc., etc., etc. should continue to maintain our websites because otherwise google doesn't have anything to work on. But go to google to find more

precisely what you want. I'd venture to add that you could probably find a subject area/age appropriate lesson plan on most anything under the sun right now, but even more so 5 years from now, using a search engine such as google. BUT REMEMBER THIS: You'll still need to go over the lesson plans you find and fine tune them for your specific needs with your specific children in your specific school. Other people's lesson plans are wonderful to have access to for ideas, and you'd be crazy not to take advantage of them--unless you're a glutton for reinventing wheels and so forth. But you'll always need to give someone else's lesson plan your own personal touch.