This is a much bigger-picture response than you are probably looking for, but in course planning I’ve found the ideas of Dee Fink to be incredibly helpful.
Here’s a website with some details.
See the pdf linked on that page for some clear and explicit advice on course planning. Its emphasis is on integration, which sounds exactly like the issue you’re wondering about.
Hope that helps.

Make sure to ask whomever will be teaching the students next year so that nothing important gets left out.

Also, my first-year teacher did us a huge favor by teaching us what the various little features of Indesign really did and when to use them or not use them. Student work gets a lot better when they know about the baseline grid and to not enable optical kerning for body copy.

Eliason,
Great link with some useful tips...thank you!

James,
I will be the one teaching the class. I have a decent knowledge of InDesign, but not an expert by any means. I could always expand my knowledge base, so any suggestions or links would be appreciated.

At my school, we weren’t allowed anywhere near a computer for the entire first semester of typography. All letters had to be photocopied or hand-traced, and the projects ranged from posters to large format books dedicated to a particular font. We were given short lectures on the history of type, basic terminology and rules, but most of the time was spent developing projects.

1. Simple word collage (photocopier)
2. Tracing an alphabet
3. Designing three letters that could’ve been part of a font (tracing)
4. Designing a poster (pasteup and tracing)
5. Creating a book that would showcase a particular font (and it’s relationship to layout, color, texture etc.)(pasteup and tracing)

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Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

A trip to TypeCon in Buffalo next month may be in order, and attendance at Thursday’s Education Forum. Lots of teachers will be there and you could have some helpful discussions.

http://www.typecon.com/calendar.php#event_2008_Type_and_Design_Education...

powers

I don’t think that you should push into anything too deep with Indesign, just use it to reinforce your teaching. My type teacher usually showed us how to do whatever she was lecturing about, for example, when we learned about grids she showed us how the Create Guides tool works. I think this really helped drive her points home, because (for those of us who had done the reading ahead of time) it was the third time we had heard it, and we were getting it in a different context. I think that it also saved a lot of time during critiques, because people rarely had to point out software-related problems.

I would avoid turning it into a software tutorial. There is so much material in typography alone that there is little time. I would surely cover what are some things needed for making good typography from book usage to ads and brochures. Touch on history of technology and valuable terms a user will need to know. Basic readability explaining the relationship of face, size, leading, line length. etc.

ChrisL

This is more of advice as someone who loved her typography teacher, but also as some one who has some misgivings about her education.

I do like the choices of projects, they are sort of similar to some of what we did in school. I am glad you are doing office supply packaging- we did food packaging- and I think it was a poor decision, because in the “real world” there are more rules for food/medical packaging.

As a teacher, use the proper names for the different parts of characters, and whatnot. Drill the names into their heads.

You don’t have to teach programs, but be open to answering questions about programs- OR even better- provide a short list of websites at the beginning of the semester of forums and sites with info on InDesign and Quark that they can use to solve problems on their own.

One last thing...we did a group magazine project- groups of five, and each group had a different kind of magazine. It was a pain, working with other people’s styles, but it was fun.

ALSO- we had to research a famous typographer- I had Jan Tschichold, and then we designed a poster for a fake exhibition on the person, in their style, or the style of the time period in which they worked. It was fun.

Anyway...my two cents. Best of luck- a teacher who cares is the best kind there is!!!

“It’s easier to tone down a wild idea than think up a new one.” -Alex Osborne

I found that the only way to complete a successful group design project, is to do everything yourself, and let others take credit for it.
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com