Sub Friendly Lesson Plans


This week has been a tough week for me. My grandmother, who I'm extremely close to, passed away on Wednesday. Her health had been declining for quite some time, however, after having a wonderful visit with her on Saturday, I never expected that the next day she would slip into unconsciousness and remain that way until finally passing away on Wednesday. I learned of her condition after school on Monday and immediately rushed over to her nursing home to be with her. I took the rest of the week off to keep her company and then to be with my family after she passed.

As I had not anticipated being out from work for so long (or at all really), I was not at a good point in my projects for a sub to step in and take over. Of course, most of my classes finished their work my first day out. As I did not know what type of computer skills my sub would have, or even if I would get the same one each day, I needed to write lesson plans that were simple enough for a non tech-savvy person to lead, yet still entertaining and worthwhile for my students.

Naturally, I turned to the Internet to search for project ideas, but found very few simple projects that I could use. Computer education is a tough subject to need a sub in, as it's quite common to have someone step in who can barely turn on a computer. So what's a teacher to do?

Since I was in panic mode, I did not spend much time searching for projects online this week, but rather made up my own (which of course my students finished much too quickly, making me scramble for more ideas again!) Now that I've had some time to breathe, I decided to look for some online resources should I be faced with an unexpected absence again someday.

Here are a few sites that I discovered that you may find useful:

Desktop Publishing Lesson Plans
Tonya Skinner, a business education teacher, has an amazing website full of great desktop publishing lessons. Many are simple enough for a sub to do with students, and others are much more complex. Either way, this is probably my favorite computer lesson plan resource. It's amazing and worth checking out in general.

Scavenger Hunts
Scavenger hunts make a great quick and easy lesson plan that requires very little prep. work for your sub. You just want to make sure that the websites that students will need to access are not blocked by your school's web filters. This particular page is also provided by Tonya Skinner (mentioned above).

Computer Lesson Plans
This site has a lot of computer-based lesson plans for various grade levels. Some are long, some are short-term projects, many are fairly simple and "sub friendly".

HotChalk
This site has lots of different lesson plans, some quite easy for a sub to teach, but there are annoying pop-up ads to contend with.

Education World
This site has 5 simple lesson plans that are actually about computer-related topics.

Hopefully you will find these sites useful. As I mentioned, it's tough to find relevant and simple lesson plans that any sub could handle, so if you've found any other great resources, please post them in a comment for all to see!

Comments

  1. Thank you for these ideas! This is my fourth week as the new technology specials teacher and I, too, just got an unexpected call about my grandmother's health rapidly declining and was called to the hospital. I was left struggling to find sub plans while I was out! Just want I was looking for.

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  3. A number of links are broken...

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    1. Yeah, this post is 13 years old, so I'm surprised any still work! Lol

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