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. rae_of_sunshineNovember 11, 2015 at 5:46 PM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. tommorMarch 21, 2017 at 4:33 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. servecomMarch 21, 2017 at 4:34 AM

    Thanks, this was interesting!

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2023 at 9:19 AM

    A number of links are broken...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anna OttoJanuary 18, 2023 at 12:46 PM

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

      Delete
  5. andersonJanuary 1, 2024 at 5:52 AM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evaluating Websites

Image
Each Friday, I spend time at the media center of a local high school making myself available to teachers who may need tech help. About a month ago, I was speaking with the school’s librarian and learned that their media center only has one set of encyclopedias available to students. She explained that over the last few years, more and more students have been turning to the Internet for their research needs; very few use the library as a resource for this purpose.  As a “techie,” this was no surprise to me, however, I can’t help but wonder how many teachers take the time to help their students learn how to identify a credible Internet source vs. a biased or hoax site.  Coincidentally, several weeks after my conversation with the librarian, my teammate and I were visiting a middle school in the district and were recruited to teach a lesson on website evaluation. We learned that many teachers are not comfortable with this topic and often don’t consciously know what tactics t
Read more

COPPA - Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

Image
As the school year ramps up, our department has been busy creating a training module on COPPA and protecting students online. This is a module that all teachers in our District will be taking this year (and likely every year going forward), thus denoting a significant shift in our District's messaging about tech integration and student safety. As part of this module, we created a short video using Adobe Voice that explains COPPA. (You can read more about Adobe Voice in my previous post.) Our goal was to help teachers understand COPPA without boring them with a lengthy written explanation. Hopefully, our little video is less dry than the alternatives.... Similar to other districts, ours has struggled in years past with finding a balance between protecting student privacy and empowering teachers to use professional judgement when selecting sites for instructional use and creating student accounts.  This year, the Responsible Use Agreement that is part of our Superintendent&#
Read more