Last school year I wrote two separate Google posts, one on using Google Forms in the classroom and one on using the Flubaroo add-on to create and grade quizzes. This year I’m going to start off by updating both of those posts, because Google has completely updated their forms! Not only can you create and grade quizzes without using an add-on now, but you can also get more advanced reports from your students’ responses.
Continue reading It’s a Google World and I’m Just Teaching In It (Part 3)
Category Archives: strategies
Literally #FindYourPark with free maps!
On August 26, the National Park Service celebrated its 100th anniversary and as one part of the celebration, we’re asking you to “Find Your Park”. The NPS now has over 400 sites across the nation that offer something for everyone. If you like mountains, the beach, or history, we’ve got a site for you.
There are more than 84 million acres across the U.S., at sites as diverse as national monuments, Civil War battlefields, and historic sites. There’s a big range in size among NPS sites, too: The biggest is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, at 13.2 million acres, while the smallest is Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Pennsylvania, at 0.02 acre. These sites attract more than 300 million visitors every year.
Shelton Johnson, a park ranger at Yosemite National Park and published author, shared his thoughts on this important milestone: Continue reading Literally #FindYourPark with free maps!
H.I.T. Notebooks: A Different take on Interactive Notebooks
Jill Weber, 2016 Gilder Lehrman Kansas History Teacher of the Year, has joined the Doing Social Studies writing team and will be posting throughout the year. The following is a cross-post from her excellent site A View of the Web.
I used Interactive Notebooks in my social studies class for eight years. The majority of the students loved them. But I had a serious love/hate relationship with them. And after taking a long look at the pros and cons of the books and my current curriculum, I decided not to continue with the interactive notebooks last year.
While I found it a relief not having to keep up with the grading of 60+ notebooks, there was something missing from my class. I had a number of kids ask me why we weren’t doing them anymore, and others who were disappointed that the “hands on” cutting, pasting, and creativity was replaced with more writing assignments. I felt guilty that my answer was “because I just couldn’t keep up with all the grading.”
That got me thinking on ways that I could bring the interactive notebooks idea back without having all the copious grading that went with it. I talked with our language arts teacher, who uses her interactive notebooks as a tool to help organize materials and doesn’t grade it at all. I liked that idea.
But I wanted more. I wanted a way to hold kids accountable. I wanted them to take pride in the organization and appearance of the book. And, most of all, I wanted it to be used as something more than a storage device. I want it to be something they will reference throughout the year.
The Idea:
Then an idea started to take form. An idea to use the notebook more like a detective’s note book when trying to solve a crime.
So this year, we have: the Historian In Training Notebook or HIT books. (HIT is a cool name for a middle school activity, right? )
The HIT notebook will be designed as sort of a history detective notebook that we’ll use to identify historical thinking techniques, analyze primary sources, keep information over specific historical questions, and refer back to skills learned throughout the year.
A few examples of possible pages . . . Continue reading H.I.T. Notebooks: A Different take on Interactive Notebooks
Five great back to school ideas for social studies teachers
(Head over here for the latest back to school post!)
We have two very simple unbendable, unbreakable rules in our house. No Christmas music allowed before Thanksgiving. No talking about school before August.
It’s August. So . . . we’re talking about school.
Spoiler alert.
If you’re not already at school, you’re heading there soon.
And you probably already have some idea of what you and your students will be doing during the first few days of school. But it’s always nice to have a few extra tips and tricks in your bookbag to start off the school year.
So today? Five great ideas that can be adapted for just about any grade level or content. Use what you can. Adapt what you can’t. Add your own ideas in the comments.
What not to do
Before we get to the good stuff, it’s probably a good idea to think about what doesn’t work. Continue reading Five great back to school ideas for social studies teachers
Play Like a Pirate – Fun needs to be a part of what you do
I spent part of the morning chatting with golfing buddy and educational expert Steve Wyckoff. He’s got a way of sucking people into unplanned conversations that end up making everyone smarter. It’s always a good time when it starts with Steve’s signature line:
“So what’s become clear to you?”
This morning wasn’t any different.
We spent perhaps an hour meandering around a matrix that focuses on levels of 
student engagement. The different quadrants of the matrix ask students to think about how challenging a class is and whether they love or hate it. We’re thinking about using this to get usable data from middle and high school students. As in, “pick a quadrant that best describes each of your classes.”
We talked about how we could use this collected data to help design high quality professional learning. We chatted about what does the word challenging mean. How grit and rigor might figure into the matrix. And how an Uber business model might impact how kids complete the matrix.
The scary thing?
I think a lot of kids sit in classes that could easily fit in the Grind quadrant.
Part of the solution? Continue reading Play Like a Pirate – Fun needs to be a part of what you do
