Patrick Malley

Back in the day, before I ever learned about Moodle, or had a care about “the power of the internet to empower students to learn,” I purchased the domain mrmalley.com. I saw it functioning as a place to offer content for my students online. No presumptions. No grand expectations. Just a website.

Well, as the story goes, in looking for a system to manage my content, I stumbled upon Moodle 1.5, and before long I was administering my own online learning environment. It was fantastic.

I only used mrmalley.com for online learning for one year before my district asked me to install and develop Moodle for use in our upper grades. Since then, my old site has been missing a purpose.

I’ve just completed a little project to reuse that space.

Using Expression Engine, I’ve built a lesson plan repository that will collect, store, and organize my lesson plans for the next few years.

I plan to start with my Introductory Psychology class (because it’s in need of an overhaul). Then, I’ll post my AP Psychology plans, and finally my plans for U.S. History. I’m going to take my time posting them to prevent fatigue and to give each class it’s due attention.

I’ve organized Expression Engine into three weblogs – one for each course – and have created custom fields that make writing lesson plans as easy as filling out an online form. Here’s an example of what the backend looks like:

As you can see, this isn’t fool proof. I still have to enter some HTML into the content boxes to get lists to display properly on the page, but it works great for a guy like me who is fine with such a thing.

The front-end is organized into three parts. The first shows a table of academic units (which are just weblog categories), the number of lessons in that unit, and a short description of what will be taught.

Selecting a unit shows another table of all the lessons in that unit with objectives. They are ordered by “day.”

Selecting a lesson plan from within that unit will show the contents of the plan.

I’ve used conditional statements in Expression Engine to only show fields that contain content. For example, if a particular lesson has no “practice” or “anticipatory set,” it will not be included on the page.

In total, I’ve put about 20 hours into creating this new system from top to bottom. In the end, though, I think I’ve created a system that will save me a great deal of time and effort. Since this is a rather geeky way of creating and sharing lesson plans, I thought I’d share. Enjoy!