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When guiding students through a long term research project over the course of many months it is imperative that the teacher can: assist with finding informative and reliable sources help with proper citations track student progress give tons and tons and tons of feedback provide encouragement when students get discouraged But then what? Once the project is done, how will the world know what a monumental achievement your students have accomplished?  Going paperless helps them carry it out and then share it with the world. My high school sophomore classes recently wrapped up a 3 month research project on the causes of the American Civil War.  The entire project was paperless.  Here's how we did it: Step 1: Introducing the Project Students learned that they would be researching an event, chosen from a list of options, and would be creating a scrapbook of primary sources.  The scrapbook would start with an introductory essay and would tell the story of ...

Maya city of Palenque The Maya were an impressive people. They built massive stone pyramids and temples throughout huge cities without the wheel or beasts of burden. They organized and conducted commerce via a complex system of roads throughout their geographical area of the Yucatan Peninsula and beyond. They used terracing, raised crop beds, and slash and burn to grow plentiful crops to feed a growing population in less than ideal agricultural conditions. Maya number system The created a complex calendar that calculated the 365 day year and used a combination of math, astronomy and science to be more accurate than any civilization on Earth at the same time. They were the first to contemplate and use the concept of "zero" in their system of mathematics. But which achievement is the most remarkable? Using the Document Based Question information from the DBQ Project and my own knowledge of technology, my students presented their arguments tech-styl...

One of the challenges of being a middle school history teacher is that adolescents are a little too old for the simple story-telling and artsy projects of elementary school, and they're too young for real in-depth research on complex topics like in high school.  Where is the middle ground for middle schoolers? Role Play! A colleague and I recently put our heads together and created a unit that required students to take on a role from feudal Europe.  They had to learn about the privileges and responsibilities that went with that role,  They had to fulfill those responsibilities and then as the simulation continued we threw some curve balls at them.  They found that the socio-economic system of feudalism developed in medieval Europe because it was the most realistic way for people at the time to solve problems and survive under the harsh circumstances. Recently, we presented about our successful experiment at the Blue Ribbon Blueprint for Excellenc...