Start with a Question

If you read my blog with any regularity or follow me on Twitter you know I've transitioned to a paperless classroom this year. I've been lucky enough to have students who are willing to be on this new adventure with me. My well-intentioned plans don't always work perfectly when deployed in a BYOD classroom of 25 students. We've decided that there are too many benefits to the paperless model to let a few technical difficulties get in our way. Teacher and students have worked hard, together, so that we can benefit from the opportunities that mobile technology provides in a paperless classroom environment.  If it weren't for my students and their enthusiasm I never could have come so far... and I truly believe there is much much more my students and I will get to learn as we continue on our adventure together. It only seemed right that when I had to opportunity to share my paperless successes at a professional conference, students should lead the way.  At the Blue...

I've used the National Archives document analysis sheets , the guided questions and charts from the DBQ Project , and lots of other formats of primary source analysis with my students.  They are all excellent tools, but they aren't FUN for kids.  I want students to be fascinated with evidence from history the same way I am.  I want them to see a connection between what a document says and what life may have been like for the people who wrote those words.   I've posted in the past about how non-traditional note-taking can be more valuable for student learning than previously thought .  I thought I'd apply that concept to primary source analysis. Last week I asked them to create some kind of image representation of a primary source document and how it helped answer our essential question: Was the Antebellum North really morally and economically opposed to slavery? You see, my New England students have traditionally been taught that the South favored slavery...

I had the opportunity to observe a colleague, Gary d'Entremont , recently.  He has done a complete 180.  Literally, he has flipped his classroom for the entire unit on the Enlightenment in our school's History 9 curriculum. I actually had some of his current students in my 8th grade classroom last year.  It was rewarding to see them working at a higher level, and I experienced my own enlightenment when it came to the flipped classroom model thanks to this experience. Here's how Gary does it. 1. Preparation Gary set up his class website (our district uses Edline) so that all materials students will need for the 2 week unit were there before they began. Explanations on what a flipped classroom is, what student responsibilities are, and how to carry out each of the tasks are clearly labeled and easy to read. 2. Formatting The text documents are posted in .pdf format.  This makes it easy for students to view them without awkward formatting problems, which ca...

I let my students decide again.  I asked them if they believed that one person can make widespread change. Their answers were mixed. I showed them this commercial from YouTube. Then I decided to trust them to choose a 19th century social reformer and how they would present that reformer to the class.  The only parameters: It had to be inspiring, touting the power one individual can have to make real change. It had to use and cite primary sources. This is what they looked like while working. Every group seemed to choose a different combination of applications.  They were even testing new ones that I haven't introduced yet like Doceri and Haiku Deck .  This is what my classroom looked like ten full minutes after the last bell of the day had sounded on a Friday!  For real, people, these are 15-16 year olds who have been through a full 5 day week of classes, and the first week of winter sports tryouts in many cases, and they stayed after on a Friday...

App-smashing, according to Greg Kulowiec , is: I'm just starting to venture into app smashing as my high school students become more familiar with a variety of iPad apps.  I don't think app-smashing is something that I could have feasibly done much before this point in the year because I needed to familiarize my students with a foundational list of the apps that we will use all year long. Once they have that knowledge base and experience, they can create all kinds of products! The Topic This past week my sophomores created videos about the European Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 .  I wanted to do more than teach them the history; I wanted them to investigate a complex question. We talked about what makes a revolution a success or a failure.  As a class, we agreed on how to design a scale of success and failure for political revolution.  You'll see these scales later in their final products. Getting Started First, they accessed the event summar...