Busy Week, End of a Brief Career, Some Great News

By Dawn Pedersen · 06/08/2009 ·

I’m winding down my high school teaching career this week. My final day of teaching high school classes, perhaps for good, is this Friday. I taught high school full time for the past three years. If you want to know why I am deciding to leave this glamorous and rewarding career, check out my latest posts at dawnsbrain.com.

The good, great, fantastic news is that I get to go back to teaching college kids (and adults) in July. I got a part-time teaching position at the Art Institute, where I will have two web design classes. Each class is four hours long, once per week, for an eleven-week quarter. I could perhaps have taught there full-time, but I want to keep my schedule open for all the freelance design work I hope to pull in.
My other good news is that I have decided to create a new side business for myself. Some of my tutorials here have been very popular. However, I’ve been kind of all-over-the-map with what I create. For the past year or so I’ve been thinking about writing a Photoshop tutorial book geared toward the classroom. So, instead of cranking out a new tutorial a couple of times a week in random order, I’m getting organized. I want to create a comprehensive curriculum and have it all online. This new effort will appear in due time at 60Lessons.com.

Here’s the synopsis:

Art and design lessons tailored for the classroom:

45-minute daily lessons

10 lessons per unit

60 lessons per course

Instructor guides

Unit reviews

Unit projects with rubrics

Unit quizzes

Subjects:

Photoshop

Illustrator

Dreamweaver

HTML and XHTML

CSS

design principles

drawing

and more!

My slogan is Daily Doses of Smart™.

I hope to build the site to

offer 60 lessons for beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels
invite guest teachers
cater to people learning on their own as well, perhaps providing paid coaching
eventually provide a social networking/community setting

Some of the 60Lessons.com materials will be free, and others will be available at affordable prices. Banner ads alone do not pay the bills, I have found.

I’d love to have your feedback on this venture. Is the 60Lessons.com concept of interest to you? What would you want to see offered?