hey guys,
i might be teaching blender to a few of my teachers art students, and i was wonderign how to go about doing that? ive never taught before, so please forgive my ignorance in the matter. does anybody know where i should start? anything? all help will be appreciated!
well
the documents are free…just print them out and start with the first part 
I’m in the middle of figuring out that same activity. I was looking at Pablosbrian as an example of how to proceed. http://www.pablosbrain.com/blender3d/ the reason is he’s doing it already.
use the template that he provides for organization. I would suggest if you are teaching students, give them a concept or problem to work towards otherwise It will be a bunch of button pressing for no reason. this may be you give them something specific to do and it makes your answers to them easy because you know what problems they will encounter or your make it more general which they might like more but then they can run into problems you may have to get back to them on because you have to figure it out yourself. i think the second can be much more interesting for all but that’s personal taste.
I used to teach computer science for kids 6 years ago, so I may have some tips.
I don’t know how old your students are, or how much to they understand about general 3D… but assuming they are young and not versed on 3D, I would start by commenting about the latest box-office success movie that used a lot of 3D stuff on it, that will motivate tham… Please, avoid Mini-Spies 3D, that 's not the idea of “3D” that you want to teach them, right?
After that, a general introduction to the 3D space, there is a good written one on the first chapters of the Blender Game Kit book, and there is an excellent one on-line at http://www.webreference.com/3d/indexa.html (Lesson 1).
Then, pick a quick over-view of the edit buttons and practice a small modelling tutorial (do you remember “walking with Mr. Basic”?) and fallow it whit them.
Further down I would proceed with the usual work flow: Modelling, Rigging, Texturing, Animating and Rendering… on a very basic level, kind of a group project.
Are you teaching the game blender or the 3d render?
they are high school students, mostly soph and frosh, and ill be teaching them 3d rendering, not the game engine
Ok than you should start by teaching the basics of molding the mesh and getting the hang of the interface, maybe start by teaching them to make a simple house. Thats what I would do if put in that position. 
I would divide it into 3 main chunks,…modelling, texturing, and lighting. First modelling,…then texturing,…then lighting.
I took a 3D modeling class my last year of college (not Blender), so maybe my experience can help you.
The class was basically a lecture with a projector hooked up to the instructor’s PC, and he walked through how to do various things. Then there was an open lab where assistants were usually available to help you.
This was a good format, but with a couple problems. The first was that a lot of the focus was often on the details of working with the program, rather than knowledge generally useful for modeling. The other was that the instructor needs to constantly be aware of the class. Merely mumbling narration while doing stuff that you are very quick and adept at doing is not as helpful as performing all the actions very deliberately and giving good reasons while doing it. Try to structure the tutorials, and have premade geometry for later lessons. E.g. it wastes a lot of class time to model some object while everyone waits when the topic is materials.
Hope this helps
reed
I really agree with that last post. I taught full-semester courses for about nine years at our local community college and it was really easy to become a “talking head.” 
When you are describing a technical tool, it’s very easy to start with “tree number one” and describe it, then move on to “tree number two” and so forth and never actually describe the forest. You fail to put the topic into context so that the students understand why a particular subject is remotely useful.
I’d suggest that you create a very simple scene involving some kind of movement, involving simple block primitive shapes and maybe a nice background, and show it to them at the first part of class. Say, “in our class this semster, we’re going to build up to this.” It might be a bunch of blocks in a toybox that come to life, pop out of the box and start running around the room. (Why not?) It doesn’t have to be a finished scene, just a good start.
Then, having built that, start working backwards in time from the projected end of the course to the beginning, splitting it down into very simple, achievable steps. Each week you’re going to put the class one small step forward, and you’re going to explain to them not only how to do it, but what on earth it is for. Each week, show them the finished video so they always keep focused on what they are shooting at. (Give 'em a movie of it to take home or download, and give 'em the finished blend-file at the end of the semester.)
I’d suggest that you present each new section of the course as “now here’s what we’re going to do next!” You know, first you build a block. Then next week you make a bunch of blocks and the put them in a box. Then you give the box a transparent lid. Then you put different colors on the face of a block. And so-on. Each section has a promised payoff, and in so doing it introduces and employs certain Blender features. (Maybe not the only way to get something done but “it works” and fulfills the promise.) The section is not about “a Blender feature,” but “a promised accomplishment.” Every feature is introduced in the context of what it’s good for, and rewarded (so to speak) by succeeding in doing it.
It’s ideal if you can structure the course so that, if a student hasn’t quite mastered topic number “n,” he can still proceed to topic “n+1” and his scene won’t quite look right yet but he can still keep going.
Especially at the start of the class, every student is going to be suffering a huge :o mind-explosion and also he/she is going to be easily and instanly derailed by anything that you “let drop” without explaining it first, maybe five or six times, patiently. A single term, even “polygon” or “vector” or “curve,” can do it. From that point on you get polite smiles but absolutely no comprehension.
Most of the “Blender tutorials,” I would say cautiously, are not really suitable for instruction because they assume too much and show much too little. %|
Even with 25 years of experience in computers, I have personally felt this feeling many, many times when trying to work with Blender. It’s no fun. It makes you feel like a damm idiot. :< … and nobody likes to feel that way, let alone in a public forum like a classroom. No doubt you yourself have felt that way, and have suffered at the hands of an insensitive instructor. It’s really awkward to realize that the instructor in question is now you, but you will. … Oh yes, you will! 
A couple of your students are going to “get it right away” and push you along, if you let them. It’s fun to teach a quick study, but that’s not what you are supposed to do. Those students are your clients.
I like to put only about 20 minutes or so of lecture and get right out there in the room, getting them started, going from desk to desk working with each one, eyeing the clock so that I spend no more than 3 minutes with each one before moving on.
And … oh yes … give them an explicit biology-break after the first hour! People need time to think, to get away from the computer and the class. A fifteen minute pee/smoke/coffee/what-have-you break is “class time.”
Good luck! (And fair warning, teaching grows on you!)
lol, i cant really do that, because im not a REAL teacher 
im jus teaching some kids blender as a branch off of my teachers digital design class (im TAing for the digital design teacher, and i offered to teach a few of his students blender)
well ive just been doing a short course in vrml, and carrara(a cheap modling program) and i can tell you some stuff that ive noticed from doing it. by the way, i quit the course because the teacher was rather bad at it.
first of all, have properly structured lessons, start of with an introduction about the basic concepts of 3d eg, 3 dimentions on a 2d screen etc.
take a prepaired scene with a bit of stuff in it, and teach then to rotate around, use the basic key board commands.
just a few links of keyboard shorcuts you could print out, there all 2.23 as far as i can tell
http://www.widomaker.com/~katorlegaz/blendertips/keyboard.html
this could be printed off and given to each student and tell them to write on it.
http://home.att.net/~alexander.michaels/Blenderboard.jpg
and show them some of your own work, show them the scene and textures etc. that will get them into it, even though they may not know at all how to do it, then come back to it later when people are getting familar with blender.
obviously next is edit mode
etc etc