Web Site Design Lesson Plans

Free lesson plans for high school web site design courses are available at highschoolwebdesign.com. The site contains a complete, 12 week course, including:

• Projects with step-by-step instructions
• Rubrics
• Screenshots
• Powerpoint presentations

If you teach web site design, check this one out!

Smart And Gets Things Done

Which is more important: being smart or getting things done? In other words, should people be commended for coming up with really brilliant ideas, or for working really hard at turning those ideas into reality? I agree with Joel Spolsky when he says that both are important.

Being smart includes:

• Being creative, that is, synthesizing existing concepts in novel ways in order to develop solutions to problems.
• Thinking outside the box.
• Developing new ideas.

Getting things done includes:

• A strong work ethic.
• The self-discipline and perseverance to see a task through to completion.
• Project management skills.

Being Smart

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is smart and gets things done. His idea for a social networking site was nothing short of brilliant. But the business only exists because he did something with his idea.

Getting Things Done

When I started my first software company, I had no idea how much work it was going to be. Had I known, I probably wouldn't have even made the attempt. My business was successful because I had a smart idea and got things done. I needed both.

In The Classroom

How are we preparing our students to be smart and get things done? Which do you emphasize most in your classrooms? It seems to me that most K-12 educators focus more on the "gets things done" side of the house. We're more interested in the fact that students complete the assigned work, following our instructions to the letter, than the ideas that students come up with.

If students don't have clear instructions, they become totally lost. All but the very brightest students are unable to come up with creative ideas on their own. We're producing a generation that is really great at following instructions and copying examples.

Making the Facebooks and Googles of the world is a lot of work. But it also requires creativity. Let's not forsake one for the other.

Dancing Bunnies Or Videos For Your Classroom

Whenever someone tells me, "Hey, check this out!", I usually just ignore them. It's usually another useless website that I'll immediately forget about, or a clever email forward that's only funny to people who are obsessed with cats, or a cute picture of a dancing bunny.

This picture is only funny to people who like cats.

The people who send these websites and emails my way have good intentions, and sometimes their recommendations are genuinely useful. But we're living in an era of complete information overload. We can't keep track of all of these great websites for teachers and funny cat pictures and dancing bunnies. In the 21st century, learning how to effectively ignore information is actually more important than learning how to find it.

Hey, Check This Out!

There is one great resource that you should definitely not ignore:

TED: Technology, Entertainment, and Design

This annual conference is held in California, and many of the speeches are available as free streaming video online. The conference includes such notable thinkers as: Burt Rutan, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Dan Ariely, Seth Godin, Richard Branson, and Stephen Hawking. The topics range from business and marketing to technology to sustainability to physics to psychology to economics, and of course, entertainment and design.

This is a chance to stream world-renowned thinkers, authors, and doers right into your classrooms. All of the talks are profound and will get you thinking about things in ways that you never have. There is sure to be a video you can use regardless of which subject you teach. I recently showed the following three videos in marketing class, and the students were hooked.

Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce
Seth Godin: Sliced Bread and Other Marketing Delights
Chris Anderson: Technology's Long Tail

Another great resource is Google Tech Talks. Google invites leaders in business and academia to speak at its Googleplex campus. These videos usually run an hour in length, and I've found several relevant talks here for my business classes, too. There are many videos of authors summarizing their new books. One particularly interesting video is this one of Barry Schwartz discussing the Paradox of Choice.

So – check out these great resources! And don't put them into your dancing bunnies folder.

Two Meanings of Accountability

About a month ago, I was discussing accountability with a group of fellow teachers. Tonight, I was discussing accountability with a group of business leaders. I discovered that the word "accountability" has two completely opposite meanings.

Accountability according to educators

Our job as professional educators is to make sure every child is succeeding in our classes. We are supposed to give them every chance in the world to be successful. Leave no child behind.

Obviously, this is difficult for several reasons. Some students are smarter than others; some don't speak English; and some just don't care. If we give a student an assignment, and he just doesn't care, and he doesn't do the assignment, what should we as teachers do? Since our job is to make sure every student succeeds, the argument goes, we need to work with him until he does finish the assignment. We need to find out why he's not doing the assignment, and try to convince him to do it, with sticks and carrots if necessary. We should stand over his shoulder and make sure he's on task. If he fails to turn in an assignment by the required deadline, we should give him another chance.

This is accountability. Teachers are responsible for making sure their students learn. It would be easy for us to ignore this responsibility and put the responsibility for learning on the student, but according to my teacher-mentor (and I quote), "we are held to a higher standard. It is our job to make sure EVERYONE is learning."

Accountability according to business leaders

Today, I attended a consortium of Career and Technical Educators and business leaders. The business representatives had a chance to look at our curricula and give us feedback. We learned what skills employers are most looking for from new graduates. Accountability was a skill that kept coming up.

Employees need to have a sense of accountability, they said. They need to show up on time, work productively, take responsibility for their own actions, stay current in their industry knowledge, and manage their own careers. If they fail to do these things, they get fired. It's the employee's own responsibility to make sure she is successful. It's not the employer's responsibility to make sure that the employee is successful. If the employee isn't meeting her responsibilities, she won't have a job for very long.

The business leaders said that the new graduates they hire do not have a very strong sense of accountability. They are quick to make excuses and expect their employer to look out for them.

What about your own teaching?

My sense of accountability aligns more closely with the second definition than with the first. I am not the type of teacher who is always harping on students to stay on task, but I am the type of teacher who will easily fail a student on an assignment if she decides not to do it. I follow the logical consequences school of classroom management.

This approach works great for me. You may prefer a different style. But we should all be deliberate about what we mean by "accountability". Of course the teacher is responsible for making sure students learn. But that should not absolve students from their own responsibilities. As with so many things, there is no clear black-and-white solution to this, just one big grey area.

Winging It, Or Not

I struck up a conversation with another young teacher today. He's been teaching math for five years, and he's just starting at this school district. We were talking about the difficulties of first year teaching: how every class is new and you're doing everything for the first time. I told him that I'd hoped that I would be able to reuse some of the materials I planned for my classes last year. I won't actually be able to, since I'm teaching completely new classes now.

He said that in his five years of teaching, he's had new classes almost every year, so he knew how I felt. He was never able to reuse any of his old lesson plans. Yearly staff changes at his former school district ensured that he'd get a totally new schedule each year. We were both in the same situation. We had prepared other classes, but we wouldn't be able to use those lessons for our classes this year.

Then he surprised me. He said, "I can pretty much just wing it now and teach a lesson on anything. What are we learning about today? The Pythagorean Theorem? OK! Let's go!"

Wow. I'd never be able to do that in business classes. No way. I can see how it would be possible to do this with mathematical concepts, which are basically procedural knowledge rather than factual knowledge. But to just "wing it" for a lesson on globalization, labor unions, or contract law? That's not even possible. Yeah, I could explain the concepts well enough, just winging it, but that wouldn't be much of a lesson.

A good lesson in topics like these must include other resources: newspaper clippings, online articles, worksheets, or videos, for example. Finding and preparing these resources is very time-consuming. This is a task that math teachers can skip (although I'm sure there are some superb math teachers who do this type of research as well).

In math, students don't learn these skills by passively listening. You can't learn to multiply just by watching someone else; you need to practice on your own. Math textbooks provide drill after drill for students to practice these skills. Teachers of math simply need to set aside some work time, assign some textbook drills, and provide individual help as needed. Very little preparation is required.

Business students learn by engagement too. They don't learn how to perform a SWOT analysis just by reading about it; they need practice too, just like the math students do. Only, business teachers can't just have students do repetitive textbook drills like the math teachers do. Teachers must seek out or create their own engaging assignments. I like using debates, essays, research papers, role plays, and even skits as reinforcing activities. Business teachers have to spend much more time preparing these types of activities than math teachers spend preparing drills.

There are a few caveats, of course. In my programming classes, I can "wing it" and teach loops and switch statements just as easily as math teachers can "wing it" and teach the Pythagorean Theorem. If I have a good textbook, I can assign exercises instead of writing my own. Teaching a class like this is pretty nice; the prep work is much less.

Also, I know that there are stellar math teachers who do all of the same research and prepare all of the same activities that I do for my business classes. Math is about much more than just learning rote procedures. I've observed some math teachers in class, and I can tell that the good ones put a lot of work into their lessons. A teacher's choice of textbook makes a big difference, too. If you're lucky, you'll find a textbook that aligns nicely with your course objectives and includes supplementary materials for teachers.

But, I do believe that some subjects simply require more time to prep than others. Some teachers get this condescending tone of voice when they tell you that "teaching is easy" or "I can just wing it". They say this as though they are such expert teachers. If you're just winging it, you're letting your students down. If you think teaching is easy, you're not doing your job (I don't think teaching is hard; I'm just saying that preparing good lessons is a lot of work). Even if you've been teaching your whole life, there are always things you can improve.

SurveyMonkey in the Classroom

In The New Face of Computer Applications, I discussed how computing is making a gradual shift from the desktop to the web. One great way to engage students using these new Web 2.0 tools is with online surveys. A number of solutions are available, but I tried using SurveyMonkey in my Marketing class last week.

SurveyMonkey lets you easily create free accounts; the only prerequisite is that you have an email address. The free account lets you create surveys with up to ten questions. The question formats and layouts are highly customizable. After you enter your survey questions, SurveyMonkey will give you a link to your survey. You can put this link on a webpage or in an email. Anyone who clicks on it will be directed to your survey. You can log back in to SurveyMonkey later to see the answers that people gave. The software presents your data in a very nice graphical layout.

My Marketing students are in the middle of a market research project, where they need to collect primary and secondary data about a particular organization and then make recommendations on how to improve that organization based on the data that they found. Surveys are obviously a great way to collect primary data about a group of people.

The students made their own online surveys with SurveyMonkey. I put the links to those surveys on my class website, and students spent a day taking each other's surveys online. Students then used Excel to create charts of the data, which will be included in their final research papers.

My middle school Computer Applications class is using SurveyMonkey too, although the requirements for their research project have been scaled down a bit.

The students love this! They like being able to do things with the web, and everyone was very engaged. In class, the students are learning how to conduct social research. We're covering topics such as: reliability & validity, quantitative & qualitative data, samples & populations, basic statistics, inductive logic, and research methods. Online surveys give students a real-world connection to these abstract concepts. I haven't evaluated other online survey systems, but SurveyMonkey has worked great for me, and I highly recommend it.

Are There Any Doctors On Board?

Who influences your teaching style? Today the answer surprised me.

We were talking about tax-sheltered retirement accounts in my Investments class today, and I was demonstrating the benefits of pre-tax accounts on the board.

Me: So, let's say your paycheck is $1000, and the government takes 20% of it in taxes (humor me here). What's 20% of 1000?
(wait a couple of seconds).
Me: Somebody say 200.
Student: 200

My face turned into a smile as I remembered one of my old deadpan math teachers who would do this all the time. Ask the class a question, give us the answer, and then politely ask that someone say the answer. This teacher's humor was even dryer and more deadpan than Leslie Nielson in Airplane!, the best movie ever made:

Stewardess, I think the man next to me is a doctor.

I noticed a dorky smirk on one of the kids in the front row whose sense of humor is apparently as dry as mine.

What's interesting is that I only remembered where I got this idea from AFTER I had already done it! What other habits, good or bad, am I getting from my old teachers? Who influences your teaching style? A lot of what goes into it, I think, isn't even necessarily on a conscious level.

The New Face of Computer Applications

Computer Applications classes at middle and high schools are usually focused on teaching office productivity tools. They usually use the Microsoft Office suite of Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint. But desktop applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

The World Wide Web has basically turned the software industry upside down. In the olden days, people would go to a physical retail store, buy a box which contained a floppy disc or CD, bring it home, install the software on their computer, and then use it. Technologically savvy users would download the software from the web instead of going to a store.

But the days of buying software and installing it on your computer are almost over. These days, most software is run in a web browser. You go to a website and can access the software from anywhere with a browser and an internet connection. Instead of buying software, the new model is to deliver software as a service. Think of your own computer use. I'll bet that the vast majority of it is spent looking at a web browser.

Things that in the past required you to buy software for can now be done on the web:

• Email: Yahoo! Mail, Gmail


• Word processing, Spreadsheets, and Presentations: Google Docs


• Customer Relationship Management: Web based CRM


• Accounting and Finance: Web based accounting


• Maps: Google Maps


• School Management: SchoolCenter, Infinite Campus


• Games: Yahoo Games


• Drawing: Draw Anywhere


• Sales Force Management: Salesforce.com

The future is clearly not in traditional desktop applications, but in cloud computing. Almost any software that a business needs can now be found on the web. There are several advantages to this:

1. Web applications are platform independent. They can be used on any operating system and hardware.


2. Updates are automatic. You don't need to re-install any software when updates are released. Instead, the software company simply updates the code on the server. Anyone who uses that website is always using the latest version of the software.


3. No more software to install. You don't need to install the software on every computer that needs to use it. A browser and internet connection is all you need.


4. SAAS is cheaper. Many companies set up their fees on a per-user basis. Software is leased, not sold. You only pay for the time you actually use the software.


5. Web applications eliminate IT overhead. Since the software is hosted elsewhere, your business does not need to worry about supporting and administering the software.


6. Web applications are easier to learn. Users do not need to learn a new UI, since they are already familiar with the web.

Businesses are realizing the power of web-delivered software. Schools are too. The districts I've worked at use Infinite Campus and SchoolCenter for student management. Both of these are great examples of web applications.

So, here's the question: with more and more software moving to the web, what are we doing still teaching desktop applications to high school students? Should we really keep teaching them Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, when the future of software is clearly in the web browser?

I say no. I'm gradually changing my Computer Applications class from the desktop world to the web world. There are plenty of Web 2.0 tools that are great resources for students:

Blogs. Blogging is a great way to get students interested in computers. They love creating their own web pages. Some free blogging services are blogger.com and 21classes.com.

Wikipedia. Wikipedia lets students contribute knowledge to the world. They can edit articles and even write their own articles. Businesses use wikis internally for communication about more specific topics.

Google Docs. Students can create documents and spreadsheets online and access them from anywhere.

Google Maps. There are endless possibilities for research here.

Social Networking. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr allow students to connect with others who have similar interests.

Let's not underestimate the power of these web-based tools. After all, they were a central part of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Look what they did for him! I've found that student get really excited about using these tools. In ten years, they'll say, "I remember when we used crusty-old desktop apps in school!"

I'm not saying we should stop teaching office productivity software. Certainly, there is still a place for this. But let's not forget about all of the other computer applications that students will be using in the future.

You Know What Happens When You Assume

One of the many important steps in planning a lesson is to identify the assumptions in your plan. What are you assuming that your students already know? Trying to guess what your students do and don't already know can be tricky work, and if your assumptions are wrong, it can wreak havoc with your lesson in the classroom.

In Career Exploration, we're spending a few days putting together a college budget. We're calculating monthly expenses and determining how much financial aid the students will need for their first year of school. Coming up with the final numbers involves a bit of math, including some very simple algebra, which I assumed the students already knew.

Some calculations in the assignment required two or three steps to complete. Similar to the way accomplished chefs leave out "obvious" (to them) steps from their recipes, I left out some of the "obvious" steps in the calculations. I'd tell the students to "average" the numbers instead of explicitly telling them how to average the numbers.

Well – you know where this is going – assuming that the students had these math skills was a mistake. When I backtracked and explicitly explained how to perform the calculations, some of the students got frustrated and gave up early. This was a big problem because the later calculations depended on the earlier calculations, which some of the students didn't complete.

The obvious solution would be to teach the students the sequence of steps necessary to perform the calculations. However, that would be a huge mistake. The students wouldn't be learning anything at all; they'd just be following a series of detailed instructions. They'd be following all the steps to average numbers without really understanding what they were doing. Anyone could do that. The whole point of teaching is transfer. If students can't complete their own budgets outside of school without depending on a teacher to show them how, what have they really learned?

I think a more effective teaching strategy here would have been whole-part-whole. Next time, I'll start by introducing the (whole) concept of a budget. Then, I'll give them the specific problem (part; like averaging tuition costs), break them into cooperative groups, and ask them to come up with a solution on how to solve it. Then, I'll come back to the budget (whole) and show them how their calculations fit into the bigger idea.

This article was originally written during my first year teaching experience.

Letting Students Experience Failure

One of the things that impressed me the most about my flight instructor was his ability to let his students make mistakes. Flying an airplane requires very precise motor control and close coordination. Your feet are on the rudder pedals, your left hand controls the ailerons and elevator, and your right hand controls the throttle, trim, and mixture. In addition to these coordinated motor controls, flight students need to learn how to make good judgments. You need to be able to estimate how high you should be at any moment during an approach to a landing. You need to predict and judge how much the wind will blow you off course. These are just some examples.

It doesn’t work for the instructor to do all of this for the student. The only way the student is able to learn these motor skills and judgments is by making mistakes for him or herself. The thing is, mistakes can be very unforgiving in an airplane. Instructors have the difficult task of letting students make enough mistakes to learn, but not letting students make catastrophic mistakes. Sometimes this can be a very fine line, especially when the student is learning how to land.

Good classroom teachers need to let students make mistakes as well. Just as in an airplane, teachers need to provide guidance. Teachers are sort of like bowling lane bumpers. They should give students plenty of leeway, but steer them back on course when it’s obvious that the student has veered too far off track. Knowing how much leeway to give is a big decision. For flight instructors, this could be a life-or-death decision. The decision isn’t quite as critical for classroom teachers, but it’s still important.

We started our formal debate in Law this week. The resolution is, “marijuana should be legalized in the US”. Tuesday and Wednesday were research days, and the debate started on Thursday. The first speaker for the pro side gave her presentation, during which everyone was very attentive. The cross examination followed, and that’s when all order in the room disappeared.

Instead of asking questions one at a time and actively listening to responses, as they were instructed to do, it was complete chaos. One half of the class was shouting at the other half of the class, and the poor student whose turn it was to present was desperately trying to make sense of it all and respond to at least some of the questions. Of course, no one heard or cared about her responses, because they were all deeply engaged in their shouting matches.

I was deliberately quiet and observant during this whole ordeal. After about two minutes of this, one of the students looked over at me and asked, “aren’t you going to stop this?” My nonchalant reply was, “nope!” After three minutes, the previously agreed-upon time limit for cross exams, I finally broke it up. I debriefed the cross-exam session. The class talked about why it was important to follow the agreed upon rules. We talked about “attack the idea; respect the person” and what that phrase meant. The debriefing was very effective and the subsequent cross-exams went very smoothly.

The students failed miserably at the first cross exam. This failure gave them first-hand knowledge of what happens when we don’t follow the procedures. The students knew what the failure looked like and why it didn’t work. They knew what they had to do to improve next time.

Had I intervened early, as the student suggested, they would not have experienced this failure. Their attitude would have been, “the teacher will intervene if we don’t follow the rules”. This is not what I wanted them to learn. By allowing the students to fail, their attitude became “that certainly didn’t work – now I know what to do next time”.

“Let the students experience failure” is a very powerful heuristic that teachers can use. Just like flight instructors, teachers need to use it carefully and strategically. Many times, though, it’s the most effective way to teach.

Multitasking

Teaching requires a tremendous amount of energy. You are always on. You must be completely in the moment every minute of every day, except for the one hour break you get for prep time. You're constantly multi-tasking. These were all of the things going through my head during just the first couple minutes of my Investments class today:

• Greet students as they come into the classroom


• Decide whether or not to give students hallway passes (these were requested by 2 students at the top of the hour, and I quickly decided not to because of the imminent lockdown drill. Of course, I couldn't tell the students my reason for denying the pass to them).


• Get the lesson plans out from my briefcase. Also get out the test, which I wrote and ordered copies of the day before, and yesterday's assignment, which I graded earlier in the day.


• The bell rings. I'm still waiting for the computer to boot and organizing my papers. Welcome students to class, tell them the plan for the day (sans lockdown drill), and tell them to quietly spend five minutes studying for the test, please.


• Computer boots. Bring up my class website that I'll need later in the period, which I already prepared.


• Dan asks what he missed when he was gone yesterday. Politely tell him that I will prepare the materials and give them to him later in the hour.


• Lockdown alarm sounds. Lock the doors, cover the windows, inform students of the procedure, turn on the closed circuit TV to await further instructions (everything up to this point has occurred within the first three minutes of class).


• Take attendance. Log on to my email system and email the office which students are absent from my class, as per the lockdown procedures.


• Lockdown drill ends. Unlock the doors and uncover the windows. Inform students that we will be beginning the quiz.


• Announce that students who needed passes earlier may come to my desk so I can sign them out.


• Hand out the tests to students. As I do this, make sure that notes are put away and computer monitors are off.


• Ask one student to remove his hat. Wearing headgear is against school policy.


• One the quizzes are out, look up the schedule of a student from my last class, who still has one of my keys for the school store. Call that teacher. Teacher does not answer the phone. Call the main office to track the student down.


• Get the missing assignments ready for Dan and hand them to him after he completes his test.


• The two students with hallway passes take longer than normal to return. Judgment call: should I ask them about this? They volunteer that the closest bathroom was still locked from the drill. They return to their seats.


• What are we doing after the test again? Oh yeah. We'll be reading an online article and answering some discussion questions, which I already prepared.


• Mentally prepare for the pre-reading mini-lecture I'll use to introduce the article to the class.


• Hand back the graded assignments from yesterday.


• The student with the missing key walks in and I eventually get the key.


• Walk up and down the classroom to monitor students as they take the test. A few students are taking a long time. Make a judgment call: give them a cutoff time of two more minutes.


• Introduce the reading assignment to the class, using proper questioning techniques to ensure students stay engaged.


• After the introduction, stop by Dan's desk and tell them he can work on his makeup assignments instead of reading today's article.

And this was just the first third of the class. Multiply this by seven hours of student contact time per day, and you can see how the job takes energy. Admittedly, the lockdown drill was unusual, but teachers face all kinds of unexpected things throughout the day, all of which must be handled gracefully. A cool head is definitely a requirement for this job.

Triage in the Classroom

I've been feeling like a paramedic lately. With the large class sizes that I have, a big part of my job is triage:.

Triage is a process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition so as to treat as many as possible when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately.

When arriving at the scene of a disaster, emergency responders need to quickly assess the condition of each victim and make quick decisions on who should be helped and who should be ignored. Ignoring someone in need is an emotionally difficult thing to do. Emergency responders must put emotions aside and rely on logic when making these decisions.


I'm doing the same thing in my classroom. My Computer Animation class has 35 students in it, and our class periods are only 50 minutes long. I simply do not have the time to answer everyone's questions. In this class, there are about four people in the back of the room with very poor reading comprehension and almost no computer experience. They require a great deal of help from me in order to finish the lessons. I'd say that I spend 50% of the class time helping these four students.

That means that the other 31 students only get 50% of the time for questions. This is problematic for two reasons. First, obviously, it's unfair that I'm spending so much time ignoring them. Many of these 31 students have legitimate questions or are struggling in the class and could really use some attention from the teacher.

The second problem is that even the 50% of the time I'm spending with the four students in the back is really not enough. Even with all of this attention, they're doing poorly in the class.

Triage is a regular part of a teacher's job. When there isn't enough time for us to help all of the students who need it, we must prioritize by evaluating who would benefit the most from the teacher's help. How do you make these decisions?

This article was originally written during my first year teaching experience.