Postgame Analysis

As a means of reflecting on what I have gotten out of this class the past four months I thought it would be appropriate to share a tool I created this afternoon to use with my students. My AP Government class will be sitting for the AP exam in a little over two weeks. Before I enrolled in this class, the process of reviewing for said exam would entail my creating a series of "old school" handouts from which they could work. Now, thanks to Educ. 584, I feel extremely comfortable whipping up a quick and flashy review using a Web 2.0 tool like Popplet. The mini presentation above is on the formal powers (those listed in the Constitution) of the President. This is an area of confusion for many students as the document lists very few specific powers of the office and the AP exam will purposely attempt to trip up students by asking them to list a formal power. If students understand what exactly the formal powers are then it is quite easy to remember that anything else, like the Bully Pulpit, is an informal power.

The true benefit of this class for me as a teacher has been the opportunity to have my students demonstrate their knowledge in ways other than written assessments. The digital story my students made on the Great Depression, as well as those they created as part of my literacy project were extremely powerful and well done. Technology will be a bigger part of my instructional repertoire from this point on.

Literacy Project Done!!!

Students have completed their digital stories and my class as a whole has watched and critiqued them. Some of my students have posted their stories on YouTube and I am in the process of getting them all collected in one common area for everyone to see.  Just to whet your appetite I have put a couple of them above. One is on immigration and the other is on the 2012 election.  Let me know what you think!
I have also added a video on 9/11 made by one of my students. It is very powerful.

Quizlet: A Great Review Tool

If you're like me you have those students who just can't get some of the main ideas no matter how many times you might go over them in class. I found a Web 2.0 tool which might help those laggards. Quizlet allows the use to make up flashcards to help them study for an upcoming test or quiz. I spent a little time exploring the site today and made up a set of review cards focusing on the terms and ideas that my students frequently misunderstand. I could post these cards on a blog or quickly create a link to them before an assessment to help ensure each student's success. This is a quick and easy tool to use and I plan to avail myself of it in the future.

In the meantime, I challenge you to go through the set of twenty government vocabulary terms and see how many of them you know.  Good luck!

Prezi: A New Presentation Tool

Here's my first attempt at using a new Web 2.0 tool. I chose to try the presentation tool Prezi and my first go at it was pretty good if I do say so myself. I created a rather simple means of introducing the political philosophy of John Locke. I found Prezi to be rather easy to use, once I worked out the initial kinks, and it even allows you to imbed YouTube videos and other links into the presentations. I think that I will try this presentation out on my students when we get back from vacation to see if it helps them better understand this topic.

Digital Story-Final Cut

Well here it is. The story has been edited and the music ends when the images are over. This production was made using iMovie which is generally a really good vehicle for making these stories. The one obstacle for us at school is that we do not have any Apple computers here at the building so it was impossible to work on it during the day unless someone remembered to bring their laptop to school. I appreciate all of the honest feedback my classmates provided and your critiques made the final product much better.

This process has been so educationally beneficial, and has ignited student enthusiasm, that I think I am going to expand the assignment into my literacy project. I am very excited to see what my students create.

The Great Depression Told Digitially

Well here is a digital story my students created on the Great Depression. It traces the event from the "Roaring Twenties" to the crash and the start of the recovery. The soundtrack is rich with music from the era and the narration is excerpted from primary sources such as a radio news account of the stock market crash and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's First Inaugural address. One thing that certainly needs to be modified is the length of the story. We haven't figured out exactly how to edit/end the song and the final selection goes on and on with a blank screen so don't be afraid to watch it as the story does not last for nine full minutes.

Please let me know what you think.








Could you please complete the survey above after viewing the story? Thank you so much.

Playing With Google Docs

I just learned how to create a survey and receive responses using Google Documents. Above is my first effort. If you have a couple of minutes please answer the questions and hit respond. I'm always interested in learning about people's level of political participation.

Thanks!!

Habemus Digitas

Anglonautes.com

Much of the country, as well as the world, has been captivated by the election of the first non-European Pontiff in over 1,200 years. Regardless of one's religious bent (or lack thereof) we can all appreciate the historical significance of this moment. The elevation of the first member of the Jesuits to the Seat of Peter holds special significance for those of us privileged to have been educated in schools run by the order. One of the primary missions of the Jesuits is to educate young people around the world and in this country they run such colleges and universities as Boston College, Fairfield, Holy Cross and Fordham. The Superior General of the Order, Adolfo Nicolas, recently gave a speech on the role of technology in our world today.


"When one can access so much information so quickly and so painlessly; when one can express and publish to the world one’s reactions so immediately and so unthinkingly in one’s blogs or micro-blogs; when the latest opinion column from the New York Times or El Pais, or the newest viral video can be spread so quickly to people half a world away, shaping their perceptions and feelings, then the laborious, painstaking work of serious, critical thinking often gets short-circuited.

[When] one can “cut-and-paste” without the need to think critically or write accurately or come to one’s own careful conclusions. When…the ugly or unpleasant sounds of the world can be shut out by one’s MP3 music player, then one’s vision, one’s perception of reality, one’s desiring can also remain shallow.
When one can become “friends” so quickly and so painlessly with mere acquaintances or total strangers on one’s social networks – and if one can so easily “unfriend” another without the hard work of encounter or, if need be, confrontation and then reconciliation – then relationships can also become superficial."

What do you think?

Diigo Home

As part of this class on Integrating Technology and Literacy I'm taking we are required to used the bookmarking tool Diigo. As with all new things, I was a bit skeptical at first. To me a bookmark is a thin rectangular piece of cardboard one inserts between two pages of a book to mark where they left off reading. I very recently began experimenting with this new tool and have found it to be a valuable way to organize class resources. I'll admit that I have some "go to" resources that I use each year when it's time to discuss certain topics such as the electoral college or political parties and I'll also publicly admit that each year I spend way too much time relocating them online. Now I have begun collecting them in my Diigo Library. This tool allows me to classify each by topic heading and easily retrieve them when the time comes.

If I Ran Things....

As someone who teaches government and Civics, and as a concerned citizen, there isn't a day that goes by in which I have at least one conversation about fixing the budget deficit. One can't open the newspaper, watch the nightly news, or even watch a comedy show without some reference being made to the inability of those in Washington to address the nation's constant budget deficit. A couple of years ago I discovered an invaluable resource for understanding this thorny issue. The New York Times created an interactive budget deficit game which allows the used to decide, by using any combination of tax increases and budget reductions, how to balance the budget. My students love "playing" this game and it is an invaluable educational tool for teaching and learning about the factors driving the budget shortfall.

Separation of Powers

Here's my animoto on separation of powers. I will certainly use this in my Civics class to introduce the concept and as a starting point for discussions. This is a concept that students have trouble with at first and I hope that this little presentation will make them more comfortable with the topic.

Really Simple Stuff

Really Simple Simplification (RSS) has been described as the "new killer app for educators" (Richardson pg. 71). The way it works is truly ingenious. The old method of reading online would generally entail one flipping from webpage to webpage or blog to blog opening up innumerable pages on your computer. By using the RSS feature, the information simply comes to the person rather than the other way around. People may subscribe to blogs, newspaper sections, online journals, or any other informational source of interest. You would then simply check your reader, I use Google Reader, on a regular basis to update yourself on the information and material out there. Once you have acquired a vehicle to begin collecting RSS feeds your "inbox" sill look something like the image below. As you can see, feeds can be subdivided into categories or topics.

Here is a PDF I found on the web on using RSS feeds in the classroom which provides a pretty simple overview and some straightforward instructions on getting started. The directions are so simple that even I could follow and understand them.  Now let's say, for example, that you want to receive feeds from the publication Education Week on topics of specific interest. You could access the list of RSS feeds available on the journal by clicking the previous hyperlink and then select by topic or grade level which feeds you wished. Updates would then be delivered to the reader tool which you could review and link to. I have just recently become familiar with this tool and must confess that it has saved me a lot of time. To quote Ferris Bueller, "Should you have the means, I would highly recommend acquiring one."

@Learning_Curve



flickr.com

I must admit that I have come late to the social media game. I always considered Facebook and Twitter to be for my students, people who subscribe to dating services, and those who have an unquenchable need for attention. About a year ago, however, I was convinced by a couple of my oldest friends to open a Twitter account. I must admit that it has changed the way I get news and information. I dare say that this social media vehicle is my primary source of such. I check my feed many, many, times each day. Twitter allows me to follow only those news outlets, people, or organizations in which I have an interest. Here is my Twitter feed at some random moment today.

These four tweets represent main areas of interest to me; sports, education, punditry, and political/social commentary. I can easily get lost in the Twittersphere at any moment. The primary challenge for me as am educator is developing ways to integrate Twitter in my classroom. I found some great suggestions in the Richardson book. For example the wiki, Twitter Collaboration Stories provides an abundance of valuable suggestions which I could certainly use in my government and Civics classes. Westlake High School in Austin, TX has a Twitter account in which one can find links to student work or live presentations. I follow many educators and professional accounts on my personal account and get some valuable suggestions for lesson plans.
In the spirit of increasing my usage of social media I have established an account for a history-themed trip I run every year. It is my goal to use this tool to send pictures back to all interested parties (parents, family members, students) and as a means of communicating with everyone back here in the "States" while we're in Ireland. We leave on Friday.

Hopefully there will be plenty of shots like this one coming back to Connecticut next week via Twitter. Here I am in front of Lenin's Tomb this past July. I am happy to report that he is still dead.

Animoto

Here's an Animoto I really liked and could use in a freshman World History class. It is on the "Seven Elements of Culture" and was recently created by Lyz who is taking this class in the West Hartford cohort. She is a 5th-6th grade Special Ed teacher. Even though this video was created for use by a teacher at a lower grade level it would be very useful as a catatlyst for discussion and to introduce the theme for the class.

WIKIed Awesome

source: flickr.com

                                                                          
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of  all human knowledge. That's what we're doing" -Jimmy Wales Wikipedia founder
(Richardson, page 55.)

That's a pretty bold boast, but as one can see from the table above the use of Wikis in the professional word increased more than fivefold during the two years from 2008-2010.  For educators Wikis would seem to provide a vehicle for constant class participation and collaboration among students. The possibilities would seem to be endless. As a cynic by nature I have a few reservations about this new tool. For example, what parameters would be placed upon student participation and contributions to classwide Wikis? How would participation be assessed? How can one ensure that authentic learning is taking place? How good are these projects?

A search of the web yielded some interesting answers to those queries.  A few teachers at Estanica High School in California are piloting something called the Aristotle Experiment. It is based upon the assumption that anything that needed to be taught could probably best be learned by the students themselves, therefore (hopefully) shifting the focus of the class from the teacher to the student. One can find links to participating classes, assessment rubrics, and online discussions on the site.

What about evaluating student learning via Wikis or even introducing a Wikiproject to students. Here is a pretty good guide/rubric to help students get started with digital group projects. With regard to grading group Wikiprojects, the site flatclassroomproject offers host of suggested rubrics that can be tailored to the specific content and grade level of the classroom. Both of these tools are pretty sound and there are a plethora of resources on the web.

Finally, as I wondered about the quality of the projects completed by groups of students I found numerous examples of sophisticated and intricate work done by student sin many disciplines. For example, this biology project was extremely thorough.  Here's a really good history fair project which pretty much makes story boards look obsolete. In the true spirit of a flat classroom here's a history project that was done jointly by eighth graders from schools in Michigan and Colorado during the 2007-2008 school year. This is incredible.

Virtual Professional Learning Communities

                                                                   zazzle.com

About three years ago our school's administration implemented the concept of "Professional Learning Communities". Now, as I noted in a previous posting, I am pretty cynical when it comes to any edubabble repackaged as the next great innovation in teaching. I'm convinced that there are no new ideas in education, only new fads. This approach encourages collaboration between members of the same academic department as well as among different disciplines. I must admit however, that, in spite of my skepticism I picked up a few new tricks,especially from my younger colleagues.

If this approach works in a small face to face environment, why can't it work in the much larger world of the web? Inspired by the benefits of doing this in my department, I embarked on a search for teacher blogs in my discipline. Wow, there is a cornucopia of resources out there in cyberspace. One treasure trove I discovered is this blog sponsored by Multimedia Learning which serves as a repository for teachers to share resources by topic and time period. I downloaded the image below.

This is simple diagram developed by a teacher which could serve as a rich starting point for a class discussion on the topic.

Another great blog I discovered is HistoryTech a rich site listing all sorts of technological resources for teaching history divided by medium, topic, and grade level.  Another really great blog is Speaking of History. Eric Langhorst, an eighth-grade history teacher, runs this blog, which offers discussions about history, technology, and education in general. There are podcasts, lesson plans, videos, links, resources, and more. I must admit that I have frittered away a good part of this snowy day searching for blogs related to my discipline and "borrowing" some of the materials.

Hmm.....maybe there is something to this professional learning community stuff.

Supplementing Texts With Blogs

One of the great issues facing teachers today seems to be to what degree they will incorporate technology into their classrooms. The most fundamental form this takes is whether or not the school will use traditional "bound" books or ebooks on readers such as Kindle or iPads. The big challenge for me is finding a presentation of history or civics that is objective. All authors have bias in their presentations and this usually plays out in the events, people, and narratives advanced in texts. David McCulloch, perhaps our country's best known living historian wrote eloquently about this dilemma in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago. He bemoaned the decline in historical literacy among students in our country and proposed some fundamental changes to the curriculum to rememdy these shortcomings. Reading Richardson's Chapters 3 and 4, and particularly the parts about blogging with students, sparked some ideas about incorporating this important tool into my classroom as a means of complementing, and at times filling in large gaps, in the text presentation.

One way this could be done, and which I tried with my AP Government class, is having them watch excerpts from a debate between Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer on YouTube on the topic of judicial activism versus originalism. You can watch the arguments made by each simply by clicking on his name. Unfortunately, any AP Government textbook I have ever considered using in my class gives little or no treatment to the originalist school of Constitutional interpretation as the authors tend to be on the left of the political spectrum and do not take this school of thought seriously. Although I don't have a blog yet dedicated to my class, I put these links up on Edline, which is the vehicle our school uses to communicate with students and parents. Anticipating a long weekend as a result of the blizzard, I assigned them to watch the excerpts and write a short paper on their understandings of the two judicial philosophies. I can't wait to see what I get on Monday.

Another useful resource for social studies teachers I discovered in this class is American Memory Online which provides both teachers and students with access to over 7,000 primary source documents, The Library of Congress site which has many lesson plans and primary sources, and Thomas which is the official site of Congress and can be used to trck the progress of any piece of legislation. The possibilities are indeed very exciting!

                    

The Overwhelming Silence

I am sitting here in technology classroom NC 4 at the University of St. Joseph's reading the blogs of other colleagues and responding to some of their posts. Two things then strike me as incredibly odd. The first is that the classroom of sixteen adults is eerily silent as if it were empty. The other is that in the midst of this quiet we are all "speaking" with one another in the twenty first century sense of the word as each of us is reading the posted thoughts and insights of one another while at the same time responding to each. There is a high level of communication taking place in this space with no vocalization. Wow, this is amazing.

Richardson Chaps. 1 & 2

Being a social studies teacher for the past 16 years I have developed an acute sense of history and turning points. As I read through the first two chapters of Richardson I could not help but feel as though mankind is in a period of time similar to that of the Renaissance when the invention of the printing press fundamentally changed everything. Religion was shaken as now the Bible was accesible to all and not simply the purview of the few educated clergy. Society and culture became much more democratic as well as ideas and commentary now spread much more freely and rapidly. The rise of the internet and technology and their consequent effects on learning and the dissemination of information will result in metmorphoses we can yet imagine.

Nothing but NETS

At first, reading through the NETS standards for both students and teachers dredges up the requisite cynicism I have in spades for what I sarcastically refer to as "EduBureaucracy". Characterisitics of EduBureaucracy (EB for short) include the use of hackneyed buzzwords, vague and unmeasurable goals, and action words/verbs used, in my opinion, out of context. For example, when reading over the standards for teachers the boring phrases "facilitate and inspire", "design and develop", and "promote and model" serve as headers for the main standards. The substandards then go on to list nebulous tasks such as "exhibit leadership by demonstrating a vision of technology infusion (new buzzer)......" Being a rather concrete person I need tangible examples of the criteria in action rather than a utopian and, in my view, unattainable plan for "infusing" (action word out of context) technology. I though that food was infused but technology?!?!

Immediately after reading through the NETS I instructed my Civics class. The goal of the class was to teach students about the idea of a social contract. Each year, many have some difficulty grasping this rather esoteric philosophical abstraction and I struggle with how to effectively teach this. It was then that the thought struck me to use technology in this endeavor. As my tenth graders are more comfortable with technology that I am, and all have access to it, I endeavored to find a resource which might facilitate the learning of abstract concepts prevalent in the class such as checks and balances, separation of powers, and federalism. After a search on the web I located such a site. ICivics Site  The site has games which students can play online at their own pace and leisure to enhance their understanding of such concepts. I plan on assigning this link to my students in an upcoming class.

The moral of this story seems to be that no abstract set of standards will provide me with lesson plans or usable ideas. For that I must enagage in that most obscene of four letter words: WORK

I am in my sixteenth year as a social studies teacher at Northwest Catholic High School in West Hartford, CT and have served as department chair for the past 5 years. The courses I teach include AP United States Government, Civics, Honors American Mind, and United States History. I have also worked as a reader for the College Board's AP United States Government and Politics exam for the last five years and have recently been invited to read this June. I am also the moderator of our school's Model United Nations club.

Outside of the classroom I am proud to serve as the President of the Greater Hartford Catholic Education Association, the professional organization representing the interests of Catholic school secondary teachers in the Archdiocese of Hartford. I was also recently elected to the Executive Board of the National Association of Catholic School Teachers for a three year term.

I enjoy travel, reading, and exercise when I am not doing the teacher thing. I truly love my job and feel blessed to be able to do it each and every day.