FRIT 7234

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

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

 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

 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