The tired stereotype of the history teacher at the front of the room lecturing from bell to bell, droning on about nothing but names, places, and dates, and never noticing the kids sleeping in the back row needs to be thrown out the window! In its place, how about a teacher that never lectures but instead provides students time to work hands on with the content and apply their learning from bell to bell?
With Flipped Learning, this is possible in every social studies classroom!
Building off of my last post about Google Forms, I want to introduce you to an add-on called Flubaroo which can turn your form into a self-graded quiz (yay for efficiency!). The steps are very quick and simple, like most things in the Google universe, and is a great way to save some trees and implement technology in your classroom.
Continue reading It’s a Google World and I’m Just Teaching In It (Part 2)
Holy Google! Have you gotten the opportunity to start using all of the amazing Google resources in your classroom yet? I am kicking myself for not implementing these tools in my classroom earlier, and I haven’t even been teaching for very long! I want to take the opportunity to share a few very short and quick strategies with you that I have used in my classroom and that are very simple to implement in any classroom, and are also very quick and easy.
Trust me. I know what most of you think when you hear about a new piece of amazing technology that you can use in the classroom – a used car salesman probably comes to mind when I start talking and you immediately want to tune me out. I also know what it is like to get information overload on new strategies and then forget about them two days later because it is impossible to use all of them in your room in the short window of time you have before you information overload again at the next inservice day.
The great thing about these Google resources is they are something that you can create in five to ten minutes and they can be used immediately in your classroom! It is seriously a very good thing that my plan period is 1st hour because I am planning and creating Google activities the day I teach them on a weekly basis. Nothing says professional teacher quite like procrastination!
First, I want to introduce you to one of the ways that I use Google Forms in my classroom. Continue reading It’s a Google World and I’m Just Teaching In It (Part 1)
Zach Wimmer is a high school teacher in Sublette, Kansas where he teaches Geography, Government, Debate, and Economics. In this guest post, Zach highlights his use of Edmodo in a Chromebook learning environment.
As schools implement a one-to-one technology initiative, it is easy for educators, novice and veteran alike, to feel overwhelmed by how they should employ them in the classroom. When my high school in western Kansas adopted Chromebooks, there were questions among the faculty about how these new devices would actually enhance student engagement.
One site in particular eased these concerns. Edmodo, in myriad ways, has improved the learning process in my Social Studies classroom immensely. As the website explains, Edmodo is “a free and safe way for students and teachers to connect and collaborate.” Continue reading Using Edmodo and Chromebooks