High-quality eAcademy™ courses are well organized, uncluttered, and easy to navigate. The aesthetic appeal of a course can truly have an impact on student learning. Strive to work toward creating concept "chunks" that are presented with a formative type of assessment to gauge learning. The formative assessment can be a non-graded type of assessment.
As a district teacher, you have created many lesson plans for your in-person courses. To help you build your online eAcademy course, Tracy Rains, Appalachia Intermediate Unit 8, shared a handy lesson planning tool she developed. Consider using this virtual lesson planning tool as you create your virtual lessons.
Step 1: Objectives
Think about the following questions as you create your lesson objectives.
What is the grade level of the students?
What is my content area?
What is the length of the lesson?
What are my specific lesson objectives?
What is my desired outcome for the students? Explore, apply, assess?
Step 2: Cycle of Learning
What specific steps will students follow in the lesson?
Explore-Explain-Apply
Explore: Students gather background knowledge on a topic. This can be through articles, videos, images, and more.
Explain: As the teacher, you supply information the students may be missing after they conducted their research. This can be through articles, videos, images, and more.
Apply: Students apply what they learned through the process. Instead of just taking a quiz, students can create something to demonstrate their learning.
Workshop Model: The Workshop Model is a teaching framework that encourages students to take charge of their own learning.
During the Mini-Lesson, you briefly model a skill, strategy, or step of a project.
The Workshop portion requires students to work on their own or in small groups to problem solve, experiment, and conduct research.
During the final Debrief, students come together for reflection and may share work samples, successes, and challenges.
5 E's Model:
Engage: Start with an activity or question to engage students and grab their interest.
Explore: Students participate in activities as they interact with the material to deepen their understanding.
Explain: With your help, students explain what they have learned and experienced when interacting with the content. You fill in any missing details or information.
Elaborate: Students elaborate on what they learned by applying their knowledge to new situations.
Evaluate: Students reflect on their new understanding of the content and provide evidence of this learning.
Step 3: Packaging
What resources or materials can I use to package this lesson?
Moodle activities and resources, videos, audio files, articles, websites, Google Apps, MS Office, Open Educational Resources (OER), Padlet, Canva, Nearpod
Step 4: Workflow
What will my workflow look like?
Push out content to students?
Collect student work?
Provide feedback to students?
Step 5: Design
Ask yourself, "How can I make this content engaging and accessible to students?" Think about these elements.
Page color
Fonts
Table properties, using headers, not merging table cells
Images