Planning and designing a web-based lesson

If you want to plan a web-based lesson, you can follow these steps:

1. Consider the ICT you are going to use (A digital camera? / A DVD? / Internet?)

2.  Design lesson plan and external material 

3. Apply lesson plan  

4.  Evaluate lesson plan (Check results and students’ reactions to the activity)

5. Edit your lesson plan (If need be!) It’s important to mention that activities for web-based lessons are task-based. This means that a lesson does not follow the traditional PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production). Task-based language teaching can be defined as “…an approach based on the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching (Richards & Rodgers, 2002). Harmer (2000) defines it as "...a task students have to perform or a problem they have to solve". The following chart shows basic differences between PPP and task-based language teaching (TBLT). It might be an oversimplified chart, but I just pretend to sort of set some basic differences between PPP and TBLT for my “newbie” teachers. You are welcome to add more! 
  A task-based methodology has 3 basic stages:

Pre-task, Task and Follow up (post task) (Willis, 1994; Richards, 1985)
 


A web-based lesson can be applied at the beginning, middle or end of the class. I think it is better after you have finished a lesson. Logistic reasons! Doing it at the beginning or middle of the lesson means that the lab should be available for you to start or continue a lesson at any time. And yes, reality checks. There’s a fixed schedule for you to go to the lab!

The end product of a web-based lesson may be: external material (printed document), a Word document or a blog. Any of them should be supported by its respective lesson plan. In the lesson plan, you state level, aim, time, etc. of the content you want to develop in the lab. The external material should be a guide for students to work in the lab. It should have activities and sites to accomplish this task. It can be a Word printed document or an electronic one to be opened from a computer (saving paper and money on copies!). The example of a lesson plan and external material was based on Franklyn Hinds’ web based lesson material from British Council, Venezuela.

Here's an example of a web-based lesson using a blog:

Reference: Richards & Rodgers (2002). Approaches and methods in language teaching. Cambridge University Press. Harmer (2002). The practice of English language teaching. Longman