Activities for the first week
For this first session, I have created the proposal for my project.  This ended up being a little more difficult than I thought it would, because I am working on a project that will be used in a large school district near where I live.  So I have to consider all of the politics that go along with that.  Will they be open to hybrid learning lessons?  Will they care if I change or tweak the TEKS to make them sound better?  Or is anyone going to care about any of this when is all said and done?  There may end up being some crisis in Math or Science the week that this is submitted, and the whole thing could just get blindly approved.  Of course, my wife is free to use this or not, but if she wants to adopt this project for the entire health department, she might have to get approval.  We will see.

Short-term objectives and plans for achieving these objectives
For the next two weeks, I need to play a little catch up.  I’m not really behind yet, but I will be soon if I don’t stay on top of it.  What I need to do:

• Continue working on objectives for each lesson
• Conduct instructional analysis for class lessons
• Analyze learners and contexts
• Begin developing assessments

Luckily, the objectives are fairly set-out by Texas law, but I will come up with some more user-friendly objectives for other teachers that use this.  I will work with my wife on the instructional, learner, and context analysis.  She has already given me free access to her class to do any testing or analysis for this project.  Since Texas health classes only last half a year, I am lucky that I will get to analyze a sample population this semester and then pilot the lessons on a different group of learners next semester.  The assessments I will work on after all of this, probably setting up rubrics for the teachers using these lessons.  I will also need to start getting the Moodle installation set-up so that I can accurately create these assessment tools.

What I have learned
I have learned that I may end up being surprised when I analyze the learner.  One idea for an activity that I had sounded great to me, but my wife didn’t think that high school freshman could handle it in a mature fashion.  When I thought about it, she was probably correct.  Just because something might be a good idea educationally, that doesn’t mean that it will still work with the learners that you need to teach.

I’ve also seen how hard it is to translate the state standards into actual lessons.  When I was a teacher, I generally just read the objectives and then taught the general concepts that were in there.  I never really put them on paper and tried to develop a lesson out of them from scratch.