Posts

Three Aspects of Assessment: Info Fluency, Inquiry & Use of tech tools

In California students are required to take a government course in the Fall of their senior year and an economics course in Spring, unless their are taking IB history courses. All of my mini lessons are on economics specifically focusing on unemployment; the different types, how to calculate it, the impact it has on countries and lastly inflation and deflation. Throughout this unit students will be assigned a country that they will be focusing on and they will do different assignments on. For this weeks post I wanted to reflect about the assessment I will be using for the inflation lesson.  The information fluency component students will focus on will be Present ~ how they can communicate their research. Students will present their research and data using an infographic, they will also be required to cite their sources.  The level of the Digital Bloom's Taxonomy I'm torn between two: analyzing, because they are looking at the data for their specific country and creating a chart
1 comment
Read more

Inquiry Based Learning.....

Image
Part 1: I tell my students and coworkers often that education in California is way different than it was teaching in Georgia. Everything from how teachers go about becoming a teacher, to the set up of schools and even the way we teach. On of the biggest change for me was learning to use the standards as a guide and that's it as compared to when I taught in Georgia the standards were like the Bible there was no deviating from them.  For me how I'd define Inquiry Based Learning is much like I teach my class (example below) but basically the students are advised of the main (required) topic - think of it like the umbrella and then they help pick/decide what we learn under that topic (the rain drops). Often times this and does vary from class to class because each set of students is different. Once the topics are picked and discussed we work as a class to come up with a research question or questions that we want to learn about. Then I take the research questions and plan the lesso
4 comments
Read more

Revisiting your personal learning goals with a focus on mindset, net-savviness, and diversity.....

Until I went through this week's readings I really thought I had a growth mindset but now I'm thinking that I've been fooling myself all along, I'm totally a fixed mindset. The funny thing about it is in my 9th grade history class I use material from Dr. Dweck in our psychology unit. I really focus a lot on telling my students that they can improve through practice and effort, yet I'm not practicing that myself. I guess over time I just got in the habit of teaching about growth mindset and I never really took the time to examine myself too closely.  I really liked The Power of belief video with Eduardo Briceno there were several ways it helped me to see ways I could personally adjust my own thoughts and actions. For example I've always had a really good memory some have even said photographic which came in handy when I memorizing dates, details and other random information for classes like history and english. However when it came to things like formulas and equ
1 comment
Read more

Letting Go

I had two immediate thoughts after reading Grant Wiggins, "Great Teaching Means Letting Go" blog; first  was that I really struggle with this with my own kids with stuff at home and second I'm such a Type A personality that it would cause me so much stress to do this in the classroom.  Everyone thinks that teaching high school students is so much easier than elementary because they need less "hand holding" and that's really the furthest from the truth, in reality it's about the same it's just different type of help they need. For reference I teach all four grades (9-12) in high school "regular" 9th grade world history, "honors" 10th world history 2, and "IB" social & cultural anthropology. At the beginning of the year I spend the first week really going on the course work, expectations and how to do everything. I provide explicit instructions, a rubric and student examples for assignments yet with my 9th graders I a
4 comments
Read more

Reflective Searching

After reading through all the material I couldn't wait to try the Google Challenge. Since I'm a history teacher I choose to go through the history questions; took time to think about some of the questions (I don't teach all the topics covered all the time.). However if I stop and look at the questions through the eyes of my students ages 14-18 year old, things would be totally different.  There are many factors that play a part in answering the questions for students would be: age of student, history classes taken and interest in history to name a few. One of the questions that I looked at said the oldest signer of the Declaration of Independence didn't like the national emblemed chosen and would have replaced it with what? Be a teacher my mind instantly goes to a list of who all signed the Declaration of Independence, then I attempt to gage their ages. Once I've done that I think about what would be considered the national emblemed and what would someone have thoug
2 comments
Read more

Reflections on Fluency

 As a history teacher I was drawn to the two videos about fake news and misinformation as these are topics that get discussed in my class on a daily basis, and it also helped that one of the articles was along the same line.  In the first video clip: Endless Curiosity: The Source of Fake News, it was a super short that got right to the point about how fake news spreads. One point that I took from it that I'll be sharing with my students is that information overload contributes/makes us share junk. I not only talk to my students about this but I also have to make sure that I'm mindful of it myself, that I'm checking things before I share and or post information. As an activity when talking about fake news I have my students pick a topic, it can be whatever they choose and then have to keep a record of how often it comes up in their social media for one week; at the end students are usually shocked by their numbers.  In the next video TED Talk: Why People Fall for Misconcepti
5 comments
Read more

Learning Goals

 I'm working to become the first instructional technology specialist in my county.  Goals: 1. To understand and correctly build/use a PLN 2. Gain more confidence in promoting information technology 3. Learn new resources to promote information fluency at the secondary level
1 comment
Read more