October 22nd, 2007 walkere
Can’t think of a way to force your students to process information and utilize higher order thinking skills? Make them draw! By converting written words and thoughts into pictures, students are at least applying the knowledge and at best synthesizing it into something brand new.
A great method for Social Studies and Language Arts that uses this approach is called historical heads. What do you need? Knowledge of a person or group of people, a blank outline of a head (Blank Historical Head), and some creativity.
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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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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 21st, 2007 walkere
The first stop in my class on the way to colonization was the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Spanish holdings constitute almost half of what is now the US, so how can we understand our history if we don’t understand those that came before us?
This lesson plan is intended to be a one day introduction to the development and culture of the Spanish Empire. It is far from exhaustive, and I would love to do more with it. However, I don’t have the time in your packed curriculum to dwell on it. So if you’re looking for a short, one day overview of New Spain, read on.
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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 16th, 2007 walkere
This lesson plan is an attempt to spice up an otherwise bland section of the textbook - Central and West African Kingdoms, circa 1450. This section is intended to provide students with some background on what the world was like when Columbus sailed west and sparked the colonization of the Americas.
The lesson begins with a simple reading prompt. It is an excerpt from Gomes Eanes de Zurara that I found interesting. In discussing the discovery of Guinea, he describes Africa as being sparsely populated by nomadic peoples. He makes no reference to the large kingdoms (Benin, Songhai, etc) or to Timbuktu.
The students task, then, is to research African civilization at this time period and write a letter to the King of Portugal to convince him that de Zurara was wrong.
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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 15th, 2007 walkere
There are countless ways to write up your lesson plans. Some teachers and administrators like long, detailed lesson plans complete with an outline of information to be delivered. Others like the short and sweet one week summary, with objectives, activities, and assignments.
No matter what type of lesson plan you prefer, it will help make your life easier to have en electronic template (probably in MS Word or Excel) to begin with. This way you can type up your lesson plans, save them to your computer, and avoid making countless copies of a blank template that you got from a co-worker four years ago.
Here are two different blank templates that you might find useful.
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