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Public education is changing.  But change is slow when new programs, ideas, or teaching methods don't fit into existing structures. Last spring I proposed a Student Help Desk program for our high school.  My hope was for students to have the opportunity to create tutorials that would help teachers and students integrate BYOD more smoothly and successfully at our school.  See, I don't believe in tech for tech's sake.  But our students are already bringing incredibly powerful smartphones and tablets to school, so why not teach them to leverage that power to enhance their academic experience?  BYOD can help students: collaborate ( Google Drive , Prezi , Padlet , messaging apps) create multimedia projects ( Animoto , Videolicious , Educreations , ChatterPix ) stay organized ( Evernote , Google Drive ) test their learning ( Socrative , SurveyMonkey , Quizlet ) This is how professionals are getting things done, so why shouldn't our students be working this w...

Here are my favorite YouTube resources for the history classroom. They've been sorted into two categories: METHODOLOGY and CONTENT. Methodology The Teaching Channel I recently started watching videos on the Teaching Channel website thanks to a recommendation from an assistant principal. I've found a few inspiring lesson ideas there that I've been able to adjust for my students and my classroom.  My favorite so far suggests teaching the Declaration of Independence as a break-up letter: If you find something on The Teaching Channel YouTube channel you can go to their website to find more resources and discussions related to that lesson.  My favorite videos lately on the YouTube channel are the interviews of teachers and students surrounding Teacher Appreciation Week and the National Teacher of the Year. They are inspiring and can really recharge an over-taxed educator near the end of a long school year. Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) The SHEG website ...

There are so many great historical documentary films out there.  PBS and Ken Burns come to mind immediately as producers of the the best ones.  However, there is a fine line between learning from a film and sitting in the classroom while a film plays.  Many students, often unintentionally, miss key parts of documentaries showed in class simply because it is hard to maintain undiverted attention to the screen. Here are a few strategies to help solve that problem. Backchannel with TodaysMeet A few months ago I wrote about my first experience with backchannel in my classroom .  Since then I've used the strategy many more times and each experience has been better for my students and myself.  This strategy works best for longer screenings that last at least half the duration of a typical class period. How to Do It Set up a backchannel chat room on TodaysMeet.com . You can decide how long the transcript will be available in advance; from one day to one ye...

My classroom feels different than ever before.  It's more vibrant. My relationships with my students are different than ever before.  They're better. I'm in the midst of my 12th year of teaching, and I have the idealism and workload of a first year teacher all over again. Why? Because BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) along with a few supplemental devices has empowered me as a teacher and my students as learners.  I'm planning everything I've taught before in brand new ways.  While we are in class for 55 minutes together, I'm doing less teaching and my teenage students are doing more learning.  And I don't use paper. At all.  Sound suspicious? Unorthodox?  Do you have concerns? *** Concern #1 : I know it seemingly goes against everything we've been taught as parents to take the plunge and purchase a breakable piece of technology worth hundreds of dollars and hand it over to a 14 year old.  They're irresponsible, distracted, and materialisti...

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...

Some concepts are just hard.  They're hard to teach and hard to learn.  Every year that I've taught the History 10 curriculum to sophomores, one of those concepts has been 19th century European political ideologies.  Conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism have never really been pulled together into a lesson that excited me or my students.  We would work through it and we'd both be OK, but never enthralled.  This year I wanted to change that. Part 1: What Do They Already Know? I asked students to define and give examples of each term: conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism.  They used their understandings from a modern American perspective.  We talked it out and they wrote their examples on the Smart Board. Part 2: How Was 19th Century Europe Different? It was REALLY different.  Before going there, though, I wanted them to know what an ideology is. The next step was to help them understand what these ideologies mean to 19th century ...