Free Lesson Plans and Teaching Resources
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Free Lesson Plans and Teaching Resources for Teachers by Teachers
Whether you are looking for a Science Lesson Plan, a Math Lesson Plan, an English Lesson Plan or a Lesson Plan for any other school subject, you have come to the right place.
Each Lesson Plan has been prepared for use in an Australian school. The material covered in the Lesson Plan is according to the syllabus of the relevant education department. The teacher who prepared your Lesson Plan used it, or plans to use it, to teach his/her students. These lesson plans are what you need if you teach in an Australian school. Unlike generic lesson plans downloaded from the web, these can be used with very few, if any changes.
Please note that a lesson plan can have other teaching resources associated with it, like a presentation or documents which can be printed as handouts. You simply zip any number of files together and upload them as a single file. Mention in your description that the plan contains other teaching resources and what they are.
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Join now! Joining is free.
Why should you join? Good question. Let's answer it straight away
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Why you should join Lesson Site
- Joining is free.
- Downloading lesson plans is free.
- To be able to download a lesson plan you must join and upload a lesson plan. Click the link to see how it works.
- You can reduce the time you spend preparing lesson plans by up to 75%.
- You can get paid for uploading lesson plans.
- The lesson plans you get on Lesson Site are not vague, general lesson plans that may be what you are looking for. They have been prepared by Australian teachers for Australian schools. Chances are you will be able to use them unchanged.
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Reduce your workload by 75%!
This is how it works:
- you prepare a lesson plan, worth, say x units of work
- you use your lesson plan in your work - this can be before or after the item below
- you join Lesson Site (once only) and upload your lesson plan
- you get 3x units of credit for your lesson plan - these credit units never grow stale and have no use-by date
- you use these 3x units of credit to download lesson plans, prepared by other teachers, worth 3x units of work
Voila! You have put in x units of work and got back 4x units of work. -
Will it work?
It only needs four teachers, submitting lesson plans, per subject to sign up for this to work.
The math is very basic. Test it yourself.
To date (12 June 2008) 241 teachers have registered with LessonSite.
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How do I join Lesson Site?
Send an e-mail with your
- Name
- State
- E-mail Address
- A choice of a few user names - case sensitive
- An author name to appear with your lessons on searches - not neccessarily your real name. Choose something original. This name needs to be unique.
to admin@lessonsite.com.au. At most a few days later you will receive your username and password by e-mail. You can then log in and start uploading and downloading.
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How do I upload a Lesson Plan?
After logging in you will be taken to a page with several form elements - text fields, etc. You need the Lesson Plan to be a single file. If you want to include several files in one lesson plan, zip them all together in one zipped file and upload the zipped file. The format can be whatever you want it to be - MS Word, Adobe PDF or whatever. For several reasons, PDF is recommended. Open Office creates PDF documents and it is free. You can download it here.
You will need to fill in several descriptive elements. If not filled in an error box will prompt you to fill them in. Double check your spelling before clicking the submit button. It is really very easy.
Should you not wait until a few hundred lesson plans have been uploaded before you start uploading?
Let's examine it logically.
Here we have you, teacher A, a teacher in a certain subject for certain years. You now decide to wait for an unknown colleague (a teacher teaching the same subjects and same years), teacher B, to first upload lesson plans before you will upload. Meanwhile, teacher B decides the same, that is, to wait for someone else to upload before he/she will upload.
Obviously, if everyone waits on everyone else, nothing will get done.
On the other hand, if you upload your lesson plan, teacher B will see it when he/she searches lesson plans. Teacher B may then decide your lesson plan looks like something he/she may be able to use. To get it, teacher B will have to upload a lesson plan. You, teacher A, will then be able to download the lesson plan uploaded by teacher B. Meanwhile teacher C comes along and sees both your lesson plans. To get your lesson plans teacher C will have to upload a lesson plan. That means teachers A and B can now download teacher C's lesson plan, as well. Now teacher D comes along...
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Who can download Lesson Plans?
Any teacher who uploaded Lesson Plans. For every plan you upload you get three times the points equivalent to use for downloading later.
The teacher who uploads a Lesson Plan decides how many points the Lesson Plan he/she is uploading is worth. Please see Lesson Plan Grading.
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Lesson Plan Grading
Each Lesson Plan is graded from one to three. A three point grading is the highest. A three point Lesson Plan took more work to prepare and includes more than your average lesson plan.
A two point Lesson Plan is the average. It should be ready to be used "as is". No teacher should disagree with its readiness to be used "as is".
A one point Lesson Plan would be regarded as totally adequate to be used "as is" by some teachers, while other teachers would feel it needs some minor work to be ready for presentation. It should by no means be a second rate piece of work. See the piece about the discussion forums below.
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How should I write a Lesson Plan?
Writing a Lesson Plan for your own use in class is fine, but many teachers will wonder if their Lesson Plans are really good enough to put up on the Net. This is completely understandable. It applies to more than just teachers and Lesson Plans.
My take on this is that if you know you did a good job with your Lesson Plan, it most likely is good enough. Especially if your Lesson Plan worked for you. Yes, there will always be nitpickers. But, in the end, there is really nothing they can do to you.
If you go to the Resources Page you will find links to various pages on the site of an American Educator, Dr Robert Kizlik. They have to do with creating high quality Lesson Plans and avoiding the common pitfalls in creating these.
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Discussion Forums
All teachers can join the discussion forums. One forum is specifically about feedback on the lessons you downloaded. Here you can discuss the merits of the lessons you have downloaded.
The feedback forum is not the only one. There is a forum for general discussion on every topic that takes your fancy. If anyone would like any specific forum to be created, please e-mail Lesson Site.
The usual rules apply to the forums:
- No profanity
- No vulgarity
- No blasphemy
- No flaming
- No libel
You are allowed to solve all the problems of the world, and of any education system, in particular, in the forums.
Signing up for a forum is totally independent from signing up as a teacher to upload and download Lesson Plans. You do not need the same username. Choose any unused username.
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What happens if someone abuses the system?
First, there are the discussion forums. Do call a spade a spade. Secondly, e-mail the Lesson Site admin at admin@lessonsite.com.au. Penalties can range from losing credit points to total removal from Lesson Site.
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Links Pages
There are several links pages.
The first links page has links to other sites with Lesson Plans. The second links page has links to other sites with teacher resources that may not neccessarily be Lesson Plans. The third links page has links to personal home pages of teachers signed up with Lesson Site. The last links page (for now) has links that teachers signed up with Lesson Site requested.
To get a link on to one of the links pages of Lesson Site please email links@lessonsite.com.au. We will first look at the site. If it passes muster (see the Discussion Forum rules) we will enter the link.
We will use the contents of your meta title element as the link text, unless you request otherwise.
Each teacher signed up with Lesson Site can request one link to a home page and links to two favourite sites.
Lesson Site can help drastically reduce the time you spend preparing Lesson Plans. Use the site and enjoy interaction with your fellow teachers in the forums.
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Breaking News!
Sources from Tasmania told us the oddest story, more at home in Ripley's Believe it or not, than on a site dealing with mundane things like Teaching Resources.
The most unbelievable thing about this story is that it has been going on for near on ten years. A certain female teacher, at her wit's end and nearly totally without means to maintain law and order in her classes due to constraints placed upon teachers by the system - let alone actually teaching her students her subject - came up with a set of incentives and disincentives, some novel and unique, at least one as old as time.
Yep, Miss Teacher (not her real name) used sex to spur on her senior (older than 16 - Miss Teacher is seriously law abiding) male students. How could she get away with it for so long? You might as well ask. According to our source, Miss Teacher dispensed her favours discreetly and judiciously. The recipient, and he alone, was told to be between two points, walking, at a certain time. Miss Teacher would watch him and, when she was sure he was alone, meet with him and they would go off for him to claim his just reward. No one knows how frequently this happened. There are some in the community who still don't believe it.
The Persian Perversion
Nobody knows exaclty what The Persian Perversion is, except that it is something highly worth experiencing. One wistful raconteur told our source that it drives young men mad and old men to the grave. He later admitted not having a clue what the Persian Perversion was and not having ever met anyone who had any personal experience with it. Be that as it may, the Persian Perversion was the utlimate prize any senior male accounting student could hope for. It only came after serious improvement in accounting. Stories have it that in the early days, nearly ten years ago, some students would win the ultimate prize, their marks would deteriorate and then again miraculously and dramatically get better. Miss Teacher soon changed the rules. Our source could not gain any information from any students or former students about the nature of the Persian Perversion. One former student whom many said had personal experience with the Persian Perversian is a partner in an accounting firm. He looked blank when our source mentioned the Persian Perversion. Then a slow smile started spreading, stopped only by his prominent ears. He muttered something about amnesia and said he did not know what our source was talking about.
Not surprisingly, Miss Teacher has nothing to say about the Persian Perversion as well as many other things. Our source said, and I quote: "for a woman, she says very little." We feel our source is not telling all he knows. Almost as if he has been bought off...
And the girls?
Something akin to clothing vouchers. What else? The girls were given a code which they had to present to a boutique. They then got clothes, from the back, at give away prices. This boutique has been implicated in selling stolen wares. Enough evidence to secure a conviction could never be obtained.
Disincentives
The nature of the disincentives, as with the rest of this story, is enveloped in dense fog. We were told that the chief troublemakers would just one day turn up, as docile as lambs. Word has it that either members of the local crime community, members of the local boxing club, or someone else, as long as he was intimidating enough, took off the trouble makers, one at a time, and put the fear of Hades into them. Like Miss Teacher's incentives, this was also well thought out and executed. No one has been apprehended for this, yet.
The Principal
The prinicpal, who threatened us with legal action should we name him, was very indignant. "These are all stories," he said. "They've been all made up by people jealous about the fact that Miss Teacher is very popular among the students and her classes achieve the highest marks in the state in Accounting every year. I am proud to have Miss Teacher on my staff and will miss her very much should she go." A look of dismay spread on his face. Was it brought on by the thought of Miss Teacher departing?
Our legal council warned us that these are all unfounded rumours. Even though we know who is involved and where this took place, we cannot tell.