Good Grief. no posts since 2011... #loser

i am an absolute failure at blogging. true story.

Stealing From John Zola Part I

After attending a couple of sessions with John Zola at the EARCOS Teachers conference in Kota Kinabalu in March 2011, I decided to try as many of his teaching and assessment strategies as possible in the last quarter of the year. I'm starting here with the last one and I'll work my way back through the others.

John Zola's Website - You can download instructions and rubrics for a ton of lesson and assessment ideas.

On John's website I found a instructions for an end-of-term poster task that I decided to use to end my 20th Century History class this year instead of giving a final exam. The students were called upon to work in a group and create a poster with a single unifying theme that showed examples of what they had learned over the course of the year in my class. Elements from at least ten of the dozen units we covered this year had to be represented on the poster. Students spent a class period reviewing the years lessons and notes, settling on a theme and creating a blueprint for their poster. Several classes were then devoted to creating the posters. Students were required to do almost all the work in class so that the participation of all group members would be encouraged and monitored by me.

For the most part, students used the class time well and I was happy with the level of participation and engagement. There were exceptions, of course. A couple of groups ended up having only one member do most of the work and some students wasted most of the class time given them. 

I used a simple rubric to grade the posters based on the theme, the units covered, the appropriateness of the images used and the level of group participation. Overall I was impressed with the creativity students demonstrated in coming up with a theme and finding symbols and images to show what they had learned.

The following are some of the best.

This was one of my favourites. I really like the choice of symbols and images to show conflict

Using gears to represent the interrelation of the events and themes of the century was a creative and effective approach

The use of a famous WWI painting of gas attack survivors as a framework for this poster was very powerful

Geography was an important element of understanding the events of the century and a couple of groups used maps to organize their information.

Vignettes representing the disasters that characterized each of the units for these students tell their story of the 20th century

Using the format of a crossword puzzle allowed this group to include vocabulary and details in their poster along with appropriate images

Oppression symbolized by the Berlin wall was used as a frame to show the darker side of the 20th Century

A creative way to organize the images and I really like the hand turning the page to the 21st century

Many thanks to John Zola for the idea and to my students for trying something new with relatively few complaints. :)

Letting Students Play to Their Strengths

In addition to my other pastimes, I coach junior varsity basketball at my high school. One of the things I focus on with the young players is learning to practice & play to their strengths. This means if you're tall and strong I'm going to encourage you to work on low post play and not spend as much time working on your 3-point game. Of course there are exceptions to this, but this is one of my basic philosophies of coaching.

This idea has found it's way in to one particular part of my history classes in an interesting way.

I like to give empathy writing assignments. These assignments are an opportunity for students to use their creativity and talents to prove that they learned something in my class. I also believe they are an important part of what I hope students take from my class. I want them to come away with an idea of what it might have been like, what it might have actually felt like to experience the events we study in class.

An example of an assignment might be to write about what life was like during the Great Depression or write about what it might have been like to live in the USSR during Stalin's purges. They can write letters, journal entries, poetry, a song or even create a picture or a cartoon. 

I give students considerable freedom with these assignments, but I always repeat the mantra… play to your strengths. I urge them to use whatever medium they feel allows them to express themselves the best.

The first time I assigned one of these, I was impressed with the effort and thought many students put into it. Each subsequent time I receive at least a few really remarkable submissions.

In addition to showing that history class doesn't need to be solely about tests and term papers, I think it shows the potential for cross-curricular integration. I would love to see students in English class get credit for writing a poem about WWI or art students getting credit in both classes for a painting about the Cold War.

I'm attaching a few samples so you can see both the variety and the sheer awesomeness of the things my students hand in. I just received another batch, so I will post a few more next week.


Daniels Awesome Great Depression Song

Luke's Trench Warfare Assignment

Bella's Trench Warfare Journal

Textbook Questions

I spent a  little time this week thinking about textbooks (specifically High School History textbooks). Some important questions occurred to me. 

First, why don't any of the History textbooks used at my school have any citations in them or a bibliography at the end?

Any good non-fiction book (excepting autobiographies) has footnotes or endnotes and often a bibliography at the end. Why do the writers and publishers of High School textbooks get a free pass on this? Having read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, I am suspicious of textbooks (American history textbooks in particular) and I think they should be made to show where the information they claim as factual actually came from.

Second, why are American History textbooks so much bigger than IGCSE Modern World History textbooks?

For comparison I looked at American Nation (Holt Reinhart) and International Relations 1914-1995 (Oxford). 

American Nation is an impressive 960 pages and weighs in at about 5 pounds. Ordering it from Amazon will set you back about $120. By comparison International Relations (my choice for 10th grade IGSCE history) is a meagre 216 pounds and weighs a bit more than a pound. I mention the weight only because of the bulging backpacks I see kids lugging around campus.

So, basically it takes Holt 1000 pages to cover the 400 year history of one country (the AP World History textbook is about the same size) while it takes Oxford 200 pages to cover one century of world history. How is this possible?

The answer seems to lie in the fact that the IGCSE syllabus does not attempt to cover all or even most of the breadth of material for the 20th Century. Instead, the aim is to teach historical and critical thinking skills by focusing on a few major themes in depth and using primary sources. The textbook itself is more a collection of sources than anything else. 

In contrast, the U.S. History curriculum at my school is a fact-heavy, chronological behemoth, just like the textbook. Truthfully, I can't even bring myself to read the textbook and I love history.  Personally, I would like to have the class read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States instead.

Thirdly, with the massive amount of totally free online content available, why do we even have textbooks?

I have followed a ton of links tweeted by history teachers I follow. Those links have taken me to many amazing sites with more current, relevant and interesting information than can be found in any one textbook that I've ever seen. Most of the sources included in the IGCSE textbooks are available online and the massive amount of information in the American History textbooks is also readily available.

Overall, I find myself questioning both the reliability and the usefulness of high school history textbooks. I have visions of students or classes constructing their own wiki textbooks online (with proper citations of course), but I have a ways to go before I tackle that challenge.

What I learned in 20 Minutes This Morning

I usually arrive at school at around 0650 every day. Most days I don't have a first period class, so by 0700 I'm usually on my laptop preparing lessons for the days classes. I wasn't in too much of a hurry this morning because much of my day was to be spent watching student presentations, so I didn't have a lot to get ready.
As I got started on a Keynote presentation, I was distracted by the chirp of Tweetdeck and I saw a post from a history teacher I follow that included the hashtag #SSCHAT. I was reminded that there is a weekly social studies chat on twitter that was starting right then (Monday at 7pm EST or Tuesday morning for me). I remembered having voted for this weeks topic even thought I had never participated before. The topic was 'using technology to enhance social studies education' so I tuned in. By tuned in I mean that I added a column to Tweetdeck for the #SSCHAT hashtag.
Tweets began popping up concerning platforms for class websites, which is currently a topic of great interest to me. I joined the conversation and was convinced to give Edmodo a try (which is on my to-do list for next week). I also sent a tweet asking if anyone was willing to share links to their own class websites so I could 'steal' ideas. I received several links in reply and now have some great examples of how other social studies teachers are building and using class websites.
I mentioned in a tweet my frustration with the block my school has placed on FaceBook during school hours and my quest for good arguments and case studies to support my case to unblock it. Cybraryman sent me a link to a resource page of his (http://cybraryman.com/facebook.html) that is full of FaceBook resources that will be of immense help to me. I also learned that other social studies teachers share my view that FaceBook should be used because students are already using it.
During the short time I was participating in the chat I also found that my PLN had grown by 6 followers. Basically, it was the most constructive 20 mins I've spent since the last EARCOS conference (which is where I met most of the people that began my Twitter PLN).

Posterous as a Collaboration Tool

I was assigned this year to one of our Critical Action Teams at school. CATs are committees that serve to provide feedback and recommendation to the board and administration of the school. I'm a part of the CAT that is tasked with examining one of our School-wide Learning Results or SLRs and reporting how well we are achieving the result and how we could do it better. The particular SLR for my team has to do with collaboration. Essentially, the goal is producing students who are good collaborators.
Owing to my coaching responsibilities, I will end up missing a lot of the meetings so I was looking for a way for the team to interact online in a simple way. Recognizing my own inexperience with most web 2.0 tools, I wanted something both easy to use and easy to explain. My choice was to use Posterous. Everyone on the team is familiar with and uses email, so Posterous seemed a logical choice. I could create a shared page which team members which they could post articles and ideas to. Other team members could read and comment on posts. The page can also serve as a record of the process the team goes through to arrive at some recommendations. I envision uploading meeting minutes as well as any conclusions we arrive at. The page could be shared with the school administration both during and after the process. Check out the page here.
I have invited the other 5 members of the team to be contributors to the page. After reading the invite email sent out by Posterous, I thought some further instruction might be needed. I created the following tutorial using Jing and iMovie. I uploaded it to YouTube and sent the link to the team members. Now, I wait to see if anyone other than me actually posts.

This was my first attempt at both tutorials and screencasts. I have already noticed several areas for improvement. Eventually I would like to start creating these for my students, so I welcome you comments and suggestions, both on the screencast and the idea of using Posterous for collaboration.

If you can't beat 'em join 'em.

OK, here's the issue I'm trying to solve. I want an effective way to interact with my students online which also allows them to communicate with each other allows parents to check in with what's happening in our class.

My school uses Edline for communication of grades, assignments, calendars, etc. Edline has no forums or embeds and is really only useful for posting grades and uploading assignments. It's basically lame.

We also have Moodle, but I know of no teachers who are actually using it and the kids have condemned it as slow (it's hosted on our school's lethargic server) and useless.

I have been experimenting Ning clones like grou.ps, but have found a reluctance on the part of students to create another user profile and join a network they have to check in on. I've kept it optional to this point for that reason.

The one thing they all have in common is FaceBook. Almost every student and most parents have FB accounts (I teach High School). Herein lies my dilemma... FaceBook is blocked on our campus during school hours. It's not accessible immediately before or after school (until 4pm) and cannot be used by students in study halls. The claim is that kids are wasting school time on FB (most of the kids find ways around our proxy server and get on anyway).

I would like to experiment with FB as a means of connecting my class and communicating outside of the classroom, but I need to make a compelling argument to Admin. Here's my idea so far...
I'm going to video my class responding to the following questions with a show of hands (I think I stole the idea from @intrepidteacher, but I can't remember):

1. How many of you blog regularly?
2. How many of you are active members of a network like Ning?
3. How many of your teachers use Moodle?
4. How many of you check Edline daily?
5. How many of you have FB accounts?
6. How many of you check FB at least once a day?

The idea is to illustrate that we are fighting upstream against a powerful tool that almost all the kids are already using.

I would appreciate any suggestions for other/better questions to ask students and for arguments in favour of unblocking and using FB at school.