EMC 300:  Designing a Web-Based Lesson

 
While many uses of technology mimic non-technology practices (such as using a word processor to write a letter), the capabilities of computers have the potential to take education beyond what has previously been possible.  In the future, classrooms may look very different than they do today - you may in fact be teaching students who are around the world from you!  By taking advantage of the unique characteristics and capabilities of the World Wide Web, educators can actually create new forms of instruction, using the Web as not only the source of information, but also as the medium of instruction.
 


Choose a topic related to your area of specialization that could be taught using the Internet.  Find at least 2 websites with information your students could use that would address at least one objective on this topic. On a new html document, create a brief thematic lesson incorporating these two resources, just as you might incorporate resources such as books or videos into a traditional lesson.   This page should be self explanatory to the level students you plan to teach.  Be sure to include an  introduction to each  resource telling students specifically what they should read and where they should go when at the resource (Web pages can offer far too many options to students unless they have an idea of what their goals are).  Then give some questions or directions for what they should do when they return from each outside resource (this might even direct them to a non-technical assignment, such as write in a journal or discuss with a partner).  Assume students have enough experience with using the Internet and with the topic itself to be able to use the Web lesson independently.  Note that this is NOT a lesson plan for teacher use, but a page students would use themselves, so address all directions to the student audience.  Include at least one image that has educational relevance and use background and text color to help create an appropriate learning environment.  Save this document to your disk as lesson.html.  This page will later be uploaded to your Web space.

Here are a few examples of past students' web-based lessons. You'll see that these lessons are very different - so there's not just one right way of doing this assignment!