Put the Title of the Lesson Here

An Online Database Exploration Lesson
for xth Grade (Put Subject Here)

Put some interesting graphic representing the content here

Introduction

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. Keep it short, snappy and interesting. Remember that the purpose of this section is to both prepare and hook the reader.

This is where you establish what the overall goal of this exercise is: a question to be answered, a decision to be made, a quick study of some complex issue.

Acquaint Yourself

Here is where you'll direct them to do a short exploration of the database. Use this as an opportunity for them to get acquainted with the content and with the mechanics of accessing the data. Include a link to the online database and point out any unique features of the site. If there is a help file that explains how to search the site, include it here.

Give them a few items to look for in the database and provide sample answers to help them verify that they can use the site effectively. This first exposure to the site should take only a few minutes (depending on the learners, of course).

Ask for Information

This is the heart of the lesson. Depending on how independent and prepared your learners are, you can provide all the questions they should be looking for on the site or none, or somewhere in between. Suggest to them some means of recording what they find. These might include:

bookmarking sites using Backflip, or
jotting them down in a word processor, or
writing them into a spreadsheet like Excel or AppleWorks, or
recording them as blobs in Inspiration, or
writing them onto a worksheet that you provide.

Provide them with some suggestion to determine when they have searched enough.

Arrange the Answers

Depending on what kind of software learners used to record their answers, there will be different ways to arrange and organize what they've found. There are two principal strategies to encourage:

Ranking the data according to some criterion, or
Clumping the data into categories, or

a combination of the two.

The best strategy will depend on the question and the data.

Apply What You've Learned

Now that you've organized your findings, what do they mean? What can you tell that you didn't know before? How will you respond to the original problem, issue or question?

Evaluation

Describe to the learners how their performance will be evaluated. Since this is a short and simple lesson, a simple checklist of 2 to 5 items will suffice.

1 = not acceptable 2 = could be better 3 = acceptable 4 = outstanding

Conclusion

Put a few sentences here that summarize what they will have accomplished or learned by completing this activity or lesson.

You might also include some rhetorical questions or additional links to encourage them to extend their thinking into other content beyond this lesson. To foster the habit of lifelong learning, give them links to additional information here that they can pursue on their own.

Credits & References

List here the sources of any images, music or text that you're using (with permission, of course). Provide links back to the original source. Say thanks to anyone who provided resources, help or inspiration.

As a matter of style and to keep ownership clear, all pages that you call up that are external to this site should appear in a new window outside of this frame. Add "TARGET=_BLANK" to the link to bring this about.

List any books and other analog media that you used as information sources as well.

We all benefit by being generous with our work. Permission is hereby granted for other educators to copy this lesson, update or otherwise modify it, and post it elsewhere provided that the original author's name is retained along with a link back to the original URL of this lesson. On the line after the original author's name, you may add Modified by (your name) on (date). If you do modify it, please let me know and provide the new URL.

Last updated on (put date here). Based on a template from EDTEC 570