Back to School Night Flipping

Stealing from Frank's idea to flip by Back To School Night, above you will find the video I am sending my parents.  I am also sending them a Google form so they can think of questions both at home and when they meet me.

To make the film I used Screencastomatic which I have featured a bunch of times on this blog. 

Library of Congress Launches Twitter Feed

The Library of Congress is sharing ideas on Twitter.  You can follow the library by typing in the Twitter search box, @TeachingLC. 

According to the Library, their twitter feed will be a "great venue for educators to learn from each other and to explore the primary sources and teaching resources offered by the Library of Congress.” 

My thanks to my colleague, Jeff Feinstein, for sending me the link.

Tweeting Your Class Warmup

As our students leave Facebook, more and more are using Twitter, among other social media. One of our new hires, Doug Zywiol, is using Twitter as a warm-up for his students.   Most of our students have phones that can text, but for those who do not, Doug is pairing those kids up into groups.  Doug asks his students a question to begin each class (he teaches US and government) and then the kids answer using his @DougZywiol in their text (as opposed to using a hashtag which would do the same thing).  What is great is that his students have to think (key word) and then write succinctly to answer his students, but it also serves as a way to quickly see what others are thinking.  I should add that Doug has always been a tech integrating teacher, but until this year was a "phone phobic," but very quickly has grown to love it.   If you want to see what he is doing, look at the link. I might add that some of his students from when he was in North Carolina are also participating!   

Adding a Video into Google Forms

Yesterday Google added the ability to insert a video into Google forms.  All you need to do is to go to the "insert" tab and then go down to "video" and then find it on Youtube.  Alternatively you could watch this one minute video to do it.  It is a great way to give your students a flipped video and then give them multiple choice or short answer questions.

By the way it does not yet work in Google Apps.  I should add that Google Apps are always behind the free Google Drive due to the fact that Google Apps just gets things later and school systems in general have to decide whether or not to turn something on for its students/staff and there are a lot of considerations in that prospect which is why I put my materials in my personal one and correct all my students' work in Google Apps.  

Jamestown and Tobacco

This is a nice short (7 minutes) on Jamestown detailing the voyage, the hope for gold and the tobacco they found.  Here are some other Jamestown items I have found over the years. 

Live Twitter Chats

Cybraryman has an incredible site that has a ton of hashtags and their times if you want to follow different subjects.  These are "live" hashtags where one goes at the time they are live and discusses topics with teachers from around the world.  As with any Twitter hashtag, discussions are limited to 140 characters, but you can add urls (shrunk - look at my recent post on this). 

Lingro to Translate, Define and Give Parts of Speech

So this year two great things have already happened.  1) I decided to improve my teaching by taking on a co-ESOL teacher and taking 10 very new to the US kids in addition to my load of 20.  Secondly my AP and I hired several very tech savvy people for the department including Caitlin Kimak who found Lingro which lets you click on any word on a page and trnaslate it with several examples, lets you hear the word and tells you what part of speech it is.  So yes, while Google Translate lets you look at more at once, Lingro gives you a different angle.  Above you can see what it did for a running site that I like. 

Three Ways to Shorten Your Urls

There are a bunch of ways to shorten a long url which you will want to consider using.  If you use Google Drive, you have some very long urls that you may want to send to your students using something like Remind101 (for homework) or if you want to write it on the board so students can get to a webpage quickly.   Here are some ways to do it:

• Google's shortener is http://goo.gl/ which not only shortens it, but also allows you to track click on it
• Tinyurl is the original shortener.  It will allow you to not only shorten a url, but you can also write customized ones (as long as no one else has done so).  This is a good idea if you want your students to go to a page continuously (think homework).
• Bitly is one where you can shorten, customize and, if you create your own account, you can keep a list of your shortened and customized urls.  So for example here bit.ly/hallaapcompis the one for my AP Comparative students for homework.  

Google Forms & Flubaroo

Why Study History?

Believe it or not I have yet to meet my students, but will finally do so tomorrow and Wednesday (and yes I am excited).   We spend the first day getting to know each other (no rules, threats of state/national exams) as I believe relationships are the most important thing in my class (yes, even more important than technology!).  On the second day I will ask the kids to get in groups and decide why we should study history.  When we are done we will start the John Green clip above at :30 and run it for 2 minutes as it is the best answer I have every heard about why to study history.  Below is a new film by Keith Hughes on what he tells his students.  After all of that then I will finally talk about what we will be learning and the structure of the course. 

Psychologists Identify the Best Ways to Study

Two of the best ways to study are to quiz yourself and to study over time instead of cramming the night before.

This is what psychologists at Scientific American Magazine discovered. To receive their recommendation, a technique had to be "useful in a range of learning conditions, such as whether a student works alone or in a group."

Self testing received the highest marks. "Unlike a test that evaluates knowledge, practice tests are done by students on their own, outside of class." The magazine says that hundreds of experiments demonstrated the success of self testing.

Distributed practice was also highly rated. Students tend to cram, but evidence suggests that "distributing learning over time is much more effective." In one experiment they noticed that kids who reviewed Spanish vocabulary over six sessions instead cramming the night before did much better on the test. They note, "in an analysis of 254 studies involving more than 14,000 participants, students recalled more after spaced study (scoring 47 percent overall) than after massed study (37 percent)"

I guess that this is our answer to kids who ask, "how do I study for the test?"

My thanks to my colleague, Jeff Feinstein, for sending me the link to this story.

More Background on MLK's "I have a dream speech."

This video gives some background (to add to what I posted a few days ago) on the "I have a dream" speech. 

How to Start Your Students on the Flipped Experience

So yesterday when George Coe and I were teaching how to flip, Frank Franz was sitting on the sidelines and occasionally answering questions.  One of the best questions was how do you get your students to accept the concept of flipping.  Well Frank is more than on top of this as he has a Google Sites page you will want to check out as well as a video for students to be introduced to the concept as well as parents (above).  But it is better than that as Frank is flipping his back to school night (in VA we have the parents come in and meet the teachers for 10 minutes).   So Frank (and I this year) are e-mailing our parents our flipped video and then giving them a Google form for their questions.  Then, for the 10 minutes we see them will give go over the questions and additional ones that come up so the parents can actually experience what their kids are doing in class.   Frank is also doing standards based learning this year which he also explains in the video. 

Reading Like a Historian: Sourcing a Document

How do you teach point of view or the "sourcing" of a primary source?  In the video above, a teacher models how she sources a primary source.  The documents are from the Stanford History education Group's Reading Like a Historian (SHEG).

Free Access to JStor

JStor (stands for journal storage) is a collection of thousands of academic journals which I used to have to climb library stairs to get.  Fortunately my school gives free access to it, but not everyone has that.  Now JStor is offering free access to 1200 journals to anyone who is willing to register and then have their user information will be shared with JStor's partners.   The other limitation is that you will only be able to read three journal articles every two weeks.  But it's not as if you are going to be sharing lots of these articles with your students, so if you do not have access, the limitations certainly seem worth it.  I found out about this from a Google+ post from

Roane Beard.