Start with a Question

During the school year of 2013-2014 I had a goal of helping my students understand the power of their mobile devices when it comes to learning.  I achieved this, in part, by going paperless in my classroom and asking students to demonstrate learning through multimedia products instead of tests.  Inspired by Sylvia Tolisano's session at BLC14 in Boston , one of my personal and professional goals during the 2014-2015 school year is to show students that the best learning happens when we leverage all of the resources available to us.  While I might be their history teacher, I'm usually not the person with the most expertise available. In fact, the world is available to my students.  They just have to tap into it. This week my students will be meeting and talking with Jamie, an Explainer at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England. Jamie from MOSI Manchester. My sophomores have worked hard to learn the proper terminology and the social and econom...

The curriculum I teach might be history, but teaching is about a heck of a lot more than curriculum.  More than anything else, building a real relationship with students is what facilitates learning.  In case I needed a reminder, my newest students for the 2014-2015 school year did a great job talking about those meaningful relationships with teachers in their first blog post of the year. On the first day of school we watched a video in which a series of teachers and administrators talked about the hard fact that every child deserves a great teacher.  As part of their first blog post I asked students to talk about teachers they've had in the past that have been "great" and to give reasons.  Here are some of their awesome answers: A great teacher must also be compassionate so they take outside factors into consideration. For example. if a student is having a rough time at home the teacher understands and makes necessary adjustments to help through that issue. ...

Public education is changing.  But change is slow when new programs, ideas, or teaching methods don't fit into existing structures. Last spring I proposed a Student Help Desk program for our high school.  My hope was for students to have the opportunity to create tutorials that would help teachers and students integrate BYOD more smoothly and successfully at our school.  See, I don't believe in tech for tech's sake.  But our students are already bringing incredibly powerful smartphones and tablets to school, so why not teach them to leverage that power to enhance their academic experience?  BYOD can help students: collaborate ( Google Drive , Prezi , Padlet , messaging apps) create multimedia projects ( Animoto , Videolicious , Educreations , ChatterPix ) stay organized ( Evernote , Google Drive ) test their learning ( Socrative , SurveyMonkey , Quizlet ) This is how professionals are getting things done, so why shouldn't our students be working this w...