Anyone know of a cool way to teach JavaScript? I'm accepted a long term substitute position at my old high school, and two of my classes are what's called "Advanced Web Page" or something like that, and I'm supposed to teach JavaScript till the end of the year. The book they have looks rather horrible. (And it seems like it's been pretty well bashed in the reviews.) I've only looked at it for maybe ten minutes, but rather than teaching the concepts behind javascript, it just shows examples, and expects you to learn mainly by changing code.
I think rather than rely heavily on the book, I'm going to try and write some worksheets, that explains a concept or two (i.e. the first one will probably look at document.write, alert(), and variables). I'll probably do them okey-dokey style, where there are questions throughout the page, and students have to find the answer them get an "okey-dokey" from me to move on. Anyone out there have experience teaching JavaScript and have some cool lessons or things they could suggest?
The other class I'm teaching is an Intro to Business class. They're using an interactive computer based training called BusinessCenter21. Talk about more bad. This is a full classroom design, with the students watching videos and things, then having to answer questions on their computers. Of course, since these are high school students more concerned with jumping through hoops, they just jump to the end of the video/slides, and start answering the questions. They're multiple choice and apparently it doesn't hurt you too much to get the wrong answer as you can guess again, for slightly less points. There are free response questions, with text boxes, but the former teacher didn't grade them, as she said the one time she did it didn't affect the grades. So the one nice thing about the system is that it allows for real time monitoring of each students progress, along with keeping grades and things for you. The bad thing is there's no easy way to export them and import them into GradeQuick, which is the online gradebook the school's using.
