Put the Title of the Lesson or Activity Here
This document should be written with the student as the intended audience. Write a short paragraph here to introduce the activity or lesson to the students. If there is a role or scenario involved (e.g., "You are a detective trying to identify the mysterious poet.") then here is where you'll set the stage. If there's no motivational intro like that, use this section to provide a short advance organizer or overview.
Describe crisply and clearly what the end result of the learners' activities will be. The task could be a:
Use this space to point out places on the internet (or physical resources in the classroom) that will be available for the learners to use to accomplish the task. Embed the anchors within a description of each resource so that your learners know in advance what they're clicking on.
The LiveText Page maintained by Columbia University's Institute for Learning Technologies is a treasure trove of ideas for teachers. (This is just an example sentence with an anchor embedded within it.)
To accomplish the task, what steps should the learners go through? Use the ordered list tag (ol) which will automatically number the steps in the procedure. Be sure to put a (li) before each item in the list, and close off the list with a (/ol). (Use angle brackets rather than parentheses). This section should be the major focus of the lesson, so the more detail and care you put into this, the better.
Here you would provide some guidance on how to organize the information gathered. This advice could suggestions to use flowcharts, summary tables, concept maps, or other organizing structures. The advice could also take the form of a checklist of questions to analyze the information with, or things to notice or think about. If you have identified or prepared guide documents on the Web that cover specific skills needed for this lesson (e.g. how to brainstorm, how to prepare to interview an expert), link them to this section.
It's possible that the learning advice would flow best if merged in with the process description. If you're providing a lot of advice, or if the data gathering and analysis process has more than a few steps, it's best to break Learning Advice out to a separate section.
Describe to the learners how their performance will be evaluated. You can link to a separate rubric document from here, or you could briefly summarize your criteria on this page. Also specify whether there will be a common grade for group work vs. individual grades.
Put a couple of sentences here that summarize what they will have accomplished or learned by completing this activity or lesson. You might also include some rhetorical questions that encourage them to extend their thinking into other content.
Based on a template written by Bernie Dodge.