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Here are some suggestions for getting ready to use the 15 lesson Asia with Pride curriculum regardless of your circumstances:
- Check out the Itinerary. You will find the complete lesson schedule under Adventure Schedule on the Asia with PRIDE home page. You will note that an introductory lesson will be posted in November. Three lessons more will be posted on December 1 just before the vessel leaves for Asia, and one lesson will be posted thereafter every two weeks throughout the second half of the school year. Titles and descriptions of the lessons are included on the web page. You may want to print out this schedule. It will help you decide which lessons are most appropriate for your curriculum, which ones you may want to team teach with a colleague, and which you may want to skip.
- Take a Test-Sail of the Lessons Yourself. Once you decide to use a lesson, work through the lesson plan for that lesson as soon as it is posted. The lesson plan is included in the Teaching Suggestions for each lesson title in the Faculty Room. At the top of each lesson plan, you will find its objectives as well as its MSPAP connections. With this information you can decide how the content fits into your curriculum and how much emphasis you wish to give it. Then work through the student version of the lesson under Learning Adventures. It is important that you know exactly what the students are doing so that you can assist if necessary.
- Lay on Provisions for the Adventure. Many of the lessons have worksheets which guide student explorations. These forms and worksheets are listed under the Teaching Suggestions in the lesson plan. Feel free to print out and reproduce as many copies of these worksheets as you need for your students. They are there for your use. Other materials are also listed, i.e. maps or atlases. You should gather these in a convenient place.
- Plot a Course. Once you've decided to use a lesson on the net, you need to determine how you are going to use it. You may want work through it with the whole class together if you have a large screen TV or have access to enough terminals in a media center or computer lab so that everyone can follow along at the same time. It would be a good idea to work through the introductory lesson, Sailing Through Cyberspace, this way. Alternately you may divide the class into teams of four or five students and have them work together on the lesson. Or you may assign students to work on their own, either in school or at home. Your strategy will depend greatly on your Internet access.
The lessons are designed so that students can work independently without teacher guidance at every moment. Thus, grouping students as teams is an excellent approach for most lessons. You may assign students to work at specific times, such as during their computer lab. Or you may permit students to go to the terminal in your classroom when they have finihsed their other work. The lessons are all divided into small segments so that students can pick up where they left off by clicking through previously completed pages if they aren't able to finish the lesson in one session.
- Plan a Strategy for Launching the Voyage. Students should not be sent to the web "cold." You should introduce each lesson to the whole class in some way. Use the Teaching Tips and your own creativity to find a hook that will grab your group. For instance, in introducing Lesson #3, Ship's Hold, you can challenge your students to be good shipmates to the crew by finding out for them how much a Big Mac will cost in some of the ports they will visit. You can explain that after three months at sea, the crew (like your students) will probably have a real hankering for some "American" food, like a Big Mac. The lesson teaches them to find out how much a Big Mac costs (in the local currency) in different countries around the world. The lesson then teaches them to convert local currency to US dollars.
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