a million monkeys typing

Call for D*I*Y Education Pack Ideas

Posted May 26th, 2005 at 11:30am

There’s a little light at the end of the tunnel with regard to my workload, so I’m taking this time to mention the status of the D*I*Y Planner.

First, there is still no version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org yet, so my template kit is still pending its “any day now” release. I am quite encouraged by the drawing tools in the beta, but the program still rather buggy at this time.

Second, my focus for the next while will be on “add-on” packages for the D*I*Y Planner which would be targeted towards more specialised users. The first two will be Education and Creativity. I’m still very much in the embryonic stages of what’s to be included, and how they will be structured.

Which brings me to the reason for this post: are there any students and teachers out there who have ideas about what you’d like to see in the D*I*Y Education Package? Currently, I only have the following templates in process:

• Lesson Plan
• Unit Plan
• Course Overview
• Materials
• Bibliography (MLA), including an index card variant
• HowTo: MLA Citations
• Timetable, both five-day and blank versions
• A marking template or two
• Attendance
• Perhaps some new brainstorming charts?

I lean towards the arts, not the sciences, so MLA is my first choice for documenting sources. That being said, I can see no reason why I couldn’t create other styles while I’m at it. I would like a few pros to double-check my work, though.

If you have any suggestions for additional templates, I’d love to hear from you: please leave a comment below or send me an email. (My address is found at the bottom of the menu at right.) Scholars, educators, students and educational methodologies being what they are, I sincerely doubt that these templates will suit everybody’s needs, but I’m trying to ensure that I take into account as many as possible. Your feedback is thus very important to me.