October 19th, 2007 walkere
Looking for an electronic gradebook? I know I was.
In the first weeks of school, I’ve had dozens of students move on, off, or around my rosters. If I’d been using a pen and paper gradebook, it would be scribbled and erased half to death. Thankfully, from the first day I kept my main records on an electronic gradebook.
I first used Gradekeeper. It’s fairly useful and cheap. It had most of the functionality I wanted, but it didn’t leave me fully satisfied.
Then one day at school I found out that we had a site license to Easy Grade Pro. This was a more robust database program for tracking students’ grades and attendance. I love the program and there aren’t many tweaks that I would want to change. Check out my full review of Easy Grade Pro at AssociatedContent.com.
Some useful features include:
- Copying students and assignments directly from one class to another
- Saving custom data on students (i.e. addresses, phone numbers, parent names)
- An array of custom grade scores (missing, excused, absent, and plenty more)
- Thorough score reporting for individual students and entire classes
- Ability to curve individual assignments and override student grades
Check it out. It’s worth the money. If you’re district bought it for you, it’s even better.
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October 13th, 2007 walkere
The century after the Reformation was an extremely violent one in Europe. Protestants and Catholics completed unspeakable atrocities on each other. Wars raged for decades at a time.
The period is significant for both European History and US History. In the European context, the wars and the eventual peace (the Peace of Westphalia) created the basis of the modern state system. In the American context, religious violence and persecution encouraged many people to flee to the British and French colonies.
Check out this lesson plan on religious violence. It involves a good anticipatory set, working with some primary documents, and challenging students to write creatively. Quite a powerful lesson, overall, and students are unlikely to forget the content.
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September 24th, 2007 walkere
This is a trick I learned in my college education courses. Another one of my classmates thought it would be a cool idea to fake a memo on school letterhead and use it to convince students that an unpopular policy was taking effect.
He told them that they were going to be charged 10 cents per page of copy paper… and that included any tests, quizzes, and assignments they did. The point was to get them to witness in a personal way the onerous nature of taxes in colonial times.
I took the technique a step further and realized that you can create you own newspaper articles. I often use New York Times articles in class, so if an article looks identical to a real one… the students are none the wiser. Check out this guide on Associated Content to learn how to write your own fake news article and make it look real.
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September 22nd, 2007 walkere
I originally wrote this article for budding freelance writers, but it could be useful for students and teachers as well.
Students always ask, “How long should this be?” Teachers can respond in a number of ways - “Five paragraphs,” “Two pages,” or “400-600 words.” What is the most precise? The word count.
One problem with paragraphs is students could interpret that to mean two sentences per paragraph or ten. Two pages could likewise mean two pages with 2″ margins and 16 point font, or two pages with no margins and an 8 points font. 4-600 words can only mean one thing… 4-600 words.
How do you measure the word count, then? If the document is in MS Word (or any modern word processor), it’s as simple as finding the Word Count feature. Check out this article on Helium to set up MS Word to tell you the word count of an article.
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September 19th, 2007 walkere
I’m always looking for primary documents to use in class. Documents that are already in electronic form are the best - it saves me the time of typing or copying and editing the documents.
The Virginia Center for Digital History has a small collection of primary documents that are suitable for secondary social studies classrooms. The goal of the website is “helping secondary school teachers … find primary resources on the web, related to their curriculum.”
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September 19th, 2007 walkere
Most kids today have computers and internet access at home. Why not create a class website to help bring your classroom into their home?
There are tons of things you can do with a class website and dozens of reasons to make one. However, you may think that it’s too hard, too time consuming, or too costly.
Some advanced projects would be hard and time consuming, but a simple class website is not. You can set up a free website for your class in about 15 minutes. Check out the guide I wrote on Associated Content, A Guide for Technologically Impaired Teachers to Create a Website to Accompany Their Classes to learn how.
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September 15th, 2007 walkere
I’m planning on doing a webquest like lesson on Monday, so I’ve been poking around the internet to see how other people have been using technology in their classrooms.
I found an article at A History Teacher with a cool tip. Apparently you can use a Google service to create a custom search engine for your students to use. You can hand select what sites are included in the index, and then students can use it as if it were plain old Google. This would probably help keep them on track, and I might look into using this later in the year.
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September 13th, 2007 walkere
Next week, my US I class will begin looking at the British colonies. Jamestown, the first lasting British settlement in North America, is naturally our starting point.
I was looking for some kind of activity to have the students do when I stumbled upon a great website - Virtual Jamestown. I haven’t worked out the entire lesson plan yet, but I’ll probably post the outcome when I’m finished.
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August 15th, 2007 walkere
Stumbled on a new website today… Technorati. Still looking around a bit, but it seems to be a kind of blog hub. It gathers data on a whole bunch of blogs, showing what’s hot, what searches people are looking for, and helping you get the word out.
You can also browse through a collection of popular videos, news stories, movie synopses, etc. Seems like an interesting place to poke around, so I’m going to sign my blog up and go look around for a bit.
Here’s a link to my Technorati Profile if you want to check out the site for yourself.
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August 12th, 2007 walkere
Paladin Tanks come in many varieties. Here is a sample build that would good for a devoted tank. The majority of points are spent in Protection with a few points spent in Retribution.
View this Full Prot Spec on Wowhead’s talent calculator.
First, the retribution part explained.
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