LO(L) excitement!

So the rush to finish the semester is on. 2 more weeks! On my way home from a family dinner last night I was thinking about all that I had to do for work this week. I instantly became overwhelmed. I needed to come up with a lab activity for my U.S. History courses, since I had reserved lab time Monday and Tuesday. (Computer labs are in such high demand at school that I had to reserve time almost a month ago, not knowing what we would be doing at the time!)

But as we drove home, I had trouble coming up with ideas. So I asked my husband for some ideas (a current administrator, former social studies teacher.) He started reminiscing about all “the cool” activities he did with students… and I began to tune him out as my mind began to race through different ideas (he didn’t notice). I knew the topic I would like to cover and I wanted to use some of my new tech skills from CTER, but how to organize the activity and engage the students with limited time constraints was the road block.

Then it hit me! Use a LO or learning object! Perfect! I could organize the activity into steps in a student friendly fashion and provide students with the necessary tools/links to cut down on time since we only had 2 days in the lab. I could post it to my CMS (Moodle) site for easy access. Yippee! I was in such a hurry to get home and start working on it because I knew looking up the resources would take a while. Thanks to the Library of Congress website, I was able to find a similar lesson activity that cut my search for resources in half! Building the LO took no time at all!

I was so excited last night that I stayed up late working on the assignment. When I was finished, I dragged my husband out of bed to see the finished product… Let’s just say I had enough excitement for the both of us =)!