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How long after a lesson plan is submitted does it take to be reviewed?

Lesson plans are being reviewed on a quarterly basis: March, June, September, December. Official notifications will be sent out on the 15th of each quarter.

My fellow social studies colleagues and I are extremely disappointed with the lesson postings. We are in the process of designing practice tests and review activities and hoped to get ideas from this site. However, once here, we found no lesson ideas for high school social studies; except for government which doesn't take an SOL test.

Dear Mr. Powell:

I regret that you were disappointed about the lack of high school social studies lesson plans on this site. As you may know, this is an interactive web site, meaning that in addition to providing opportunities to obtain information, there are opportunities for sharing as well. The success of the lesson plan component of this site is largely dependant upon the contributions of teachers who are willing to share their material.

As Alison pointed out above, lesson plans are reviewed and posted quarterly. This means that those lesson plans that are submitted between now and the end of May will be evaluated during that time frame, and those that meet the criteria will be posted on or about the first day of June. This will be repeated throughout the year, with postings occurring on or about the first day of March, June, September, and December.

Many of the teachers with whom I have spoken have indicated they will be submitting multiple plans over the summer, meaning that the lesson plan bank will probably show profound growth by the time of the September 1 posting.

I hope that you and your colleagues will be willing to share your favorite lesson plans on this site. In case you are not aware, recertification points can be earned for plans that are submitted and approved.

For more information about how to submit lesson plans, click on “Lesson Plans,” the second item on the menu to the left.

Cheri Pierson Yecke
Deputy Secretary of Education

Dear Eric

I recently ran across your comment concerning the lack of lesson plans found on this web site that would help high school teachers implement the History Standards of Learning. I wish I could assure you that there will be some appearing soon, but I cannot. The lesson plan section of this site was meant to be teacher-to-teacher: teachers submit plans, the plans are reviewed by a committee of teachers, and if approved, the plans are posted. The amount of lessons you find here totally depends upon the number of teachers who care enough to write and submit them. Any teacher whose plan is approved receives five re-certification points.
But earning points should be secondary to helping each other implement the standards. If not enough teachers respond, our students miss out. My hope is that master teachers will lead the way in making lessons available. Everyone would benefit.
There is a great need for social studies plans at all levels. Please encourage your colleagues to submit. Thanks so much for your interest in this site.

Linda Koutoufas
VA Teacher of the Year

I would like to add my voice to Linda's in encouraging teachers of all subjects to share their great ideas. One of the great fears that many teachers in Virginia have is that because of the SOL's, we will have to stop using our favorite creative lessons and units. I firmly believe that
this is NOT true; this website gives us one forum for showing that this is not true. This is the opportunity for all teachers who have fun, exciting, effective lessons which do address SOL's to post those lessons and demonstrate which SOL's are addressed.

As a member of the review committee, I am finding that many of the lessons that are being submitted do in fact address more than one SOL at a time, and they often even address SOL's in more than one subject area. This is great information for all teachers.

I believe that as more lessons are contributed to the site, teachers will begin to see how many of the lessons they already teach--and love to teach!--are in fact SOL lessons, even though they were, in many cases, developed before the SOL's and without the SOL's specifically in mind. This
will in turn encourage more teachers to contribute, resulting, eventually, in a large bank of plans for people to draw from.

But as Linda suggests, the success of the site depends entirely on the willingness of teachers to share their work. So far relatively few lessons have been submitted; we hope that more people will learn about the site and be willing to contribute their ideas!

Carolyn P. Henly

I submitted 15 lesson plans to you on Friday, April 2, 1999. I have yet to hear whether they were received by you, much less whether you have had time to review any of them! It would be nice for me to hear that they were received, atleast! I have sent other messages to you...I still have not heard a word... Here's one more try...
Mary J. Brown

Dear Mary J.,

I review lesson plans submitted to the Commonwealth of Knowledge web site to see that they are correctly formatted so that the review committe can approve or reject them for publication. I remember coming across yours because I was delighted that one person had submitted so many; however, the first date recorded showing that they were received by our site was April 20, not April 2, so I do not know what happened in the interim.

At the same time we received your plans, we found we had a serious problem with our procedure in the lesson plan section of the site. All plans being sent to the committee for review were being placed on the web site, no matter if they had been approved or rejected. This had to be corrected, as only plans officially approved should have been sent on. We stopped forwarding plans immediately, and as other modificatons were being made to the site, it was not until May 24 that plans could then be sent on.

As each plan is checked for correct formatting and forwarded to the committee, an e-mail is sent directly to the person authoring that plan. Without an e-mail address, the plan is forwarded to the Dept. of Education, which must then contact the author. This takes much longer than sending an e-mail. As I sent your plans through last week with the others, I noticed that you did not include an e-mail address. One is not required for submission, but without it, contact with you takes longer.

We regret the delay, but the problem had to be corrected, and the changes made to the site make it easier for teachers to now select the correct SOL. Previously, plans were deleted from the site because the SOL was incorrectly typed or not spaced as stated.

Thank you for submitting so many plans. Committee members will be working overtime to ensure that all submitted are finalized by June 21.

Linda Koutoufas
Va. Teacher of the Year

Official notifications for the second quarter of 1999 are expected to be mailed by the 4th of July. The Commonwealth of Knowledge Review Panel has been working diligently to review lesson plans. We have received over 200 submissions to the site. Lesson plans are now being accepted for the 3rd quarter ending September 1999.

Alison Anderson
Webmaster
Commonwealth of Knowledge

During Christmas vacation, I submitted a lesson plan on static electricity. I never heard whether or not it was received until June 6, when I received an e-mail message saying that my lesson was received and would be reviewed. Until today I have never submitted another one, so may I assume that my static lesson will actually be reviewed? I'll be happy to re-submit if necessary, but I'd like to know for sure.

Sherrill Mulkearns

Dear Sherrill,

I am responding to your inquiry about the lesson plan, "Static Electricity" which you submitted earlier in the year. Your plan has been approved for ten recertification points and it will be published on this site. Unfortunately we had difficulty decoding the SOLs you typed as there must be proper spacing and a comma between each. If not, we are unable to read them correctly. As the directions on the submission page were not specific enough about the procedure, this was a problem we had with many plans; therefore, the format was changed to make it easier for teachers to use. We have now gone to a checklist for SOLs, rather than having teachers type them in.

We were going to have to reject your plan at first because we were unable to read the SOLs, but asked the web master instead to see if a correction could be made to redo them so that you would not have to resubmit. This was accomplished, but when the plan was in the process of being returned to the review committee section of this site, it was inadvertently sent to the administrative section where new plans are listed. We have now made the changes and it will soon be published.

Thank you for your patience in this matter. As this is a relatively new site that receives numerous plans on a regular basis, we do run into some problems. We thank you for taking the time to submit a valuable plan, and hope you will consider doing so again in the future.

Sincerely,
Linda Koutoufas
Chairperson, Lesson Plan Review Committee

Official approval letters for the second quarter are in the mail.

If your lesson plan was not approved, we encourage you to review the committee comments and re-submit. A link to your lesson plan as it was submitted has been provided to facilitate the process. Open your lesson plan from the link, and copy and paste the text of your lesson plan into a word processing program. Make the changes, and do a spell check. Copy and paste your revised lesson plan into the share a lesson plan form.

Short cut keys:
Select All: ctrl + a
Copy: ctrl + c
Paste: ctrl + v
Undo: ctrl + z

For those with a school e-mail address, be advised we returned lesson plans electronically.

I cannot recommend this program. It has been more than a year since I submitted my lesson and I haven't been notified yet, and today is July 4th! I submitted the lesson plan twice! The original submission is now over a year old, and the second was back in April at Alison Anderson"s request. (Remeber this conversation Alison?)

>Good morning Wayne-
>Thank you for your re-submission and your >patience. Your lesson plan
>entitled "Mapping Animal Behavior at the Zoo" has >been submitted to the
>recertification committee for second quarter >review. Official
>notification will be sent to you by June 15th.
>Obviously, your original submission did not >migrate properly to or
>through our database on the first go-round.
>We apologize for any inconvenience.
>Have a great day!
>Alison Anderson
>Webmaster
>http://www.knowledge.state.va.us/
>
> OK, I have resubmitted the lesson. I got the confirmation message again.
>
> "Thank you for sharing a lesson plan. Your submission will be reviewed before adding to
> the database."
>
> Wayne

Good afternoon Wayne-
Your lesson plan has been officially approved as indicated by the recertification seal. Your name was submitted to the Department of Education in the Second Quarter Approval report. The Department of Education mailed official approval letters and certificates on 1 July 1999...so i assume yours is in the mail. If you do not receive a letter next week, please contact me.

Ideally notifications should be sent out on the 15th of the respective quarter; however, during the second quarter, we encountered some obstacles. Committee operations were halted during the month of May while extensive programming changes occurred on the Commonwealth of Knowledge. Feedback indicated a need to modify the Standards of Learning database. Furthermore, the lesson plan submit form was overhauled to ensure proper shuttling through the site. The commitee resumed operations over the Memorial Day Holiday weekend and was faced with an administrative backlog of about 104 submissions. We extended the committee review process for the second quarter until 18 June 1999. The official approval report for the Second Quarter was generated and forwarded to the Department of Education. In order to mail certificates, we needed to manually look up addresses because we did not include an address field in the original lesson plan submission form. The Department of Education printed letters and certificates and mailed them on 1 July 1999. And if you will notice, we have included an address field on the submit a lesson plan form.

The Commonwealth of Knowledge is an excellent resource for educators across the Commonwealth of Virginia. The content is generated by our teachers. This initiative has provided an outlet for communication as evidenced on this discussion forum.
Have a great day!
ali

If any of you were expecting a letter confirming that your lesson plan had been accepted, and did not receive it, check your school. I just happened to drop by my school yesterday (I don't spend a lot of time there in July), and my letter was in my box. It was indeed dated July 1 and had apparently been there for several weeks.

Suppose my lesson plan includes graphics, such as a drawing of my own for using manipulatives in math--your format for entering lesson plans does not allow me much freedom to use graphics--can anything be done about this?

Good afternoon Mary Ellen-

Digital attachments including .jpgs, .gifs, .ppts, .pdfs, .txt, .docs may be e-mailed directly to
knowledge@vipnet.org

Please include the title of your lesson plan, and we will make the appropriate links.

Is it possible to send a lesson plan through the mail rather than over email; and if so, where would one send it? I do not feel secure using the template and uploading the lesson to the site. Thanks in advance,
Jean Koch
jkoch@whro.net

Good evening Jean:

At this time we do not have a mechanism in place to efficiently process hard copy submissions. In addition to providing an outlet for communication, the Commonwealth of Knowledge dynamically links lesson plans and educational resources to the Standards of Learning. The lesson plan form is the primary point of data entry. Be advised we will be implementing modifications to streamline the lesson plan submit form to one page by early next week, in fact.

The following is a direct link to the lesson plan form:

http://www.knowledge.state.va.us/frames/main/lesson/lesadd1.cfm