First semester thoughts and reflections

So....my last post was August and talked all about next week's post and all I'd have to say about preparing for a new school, grade level and course.  So much for that I guess.  And even though it isn't really the end of the first semester yet, it seems like this may be one of the few times I can sit down and write.  First and foremost, I love my new position.  Not a minute has gone by where I regret changing districts and schools.  And that is not meant to be a knock on where I was, I liked my colleagues, admin, students, etc.  But from the minute I decided to go back to school to get my teaching certifications, I think I always envisioned myself at the high school level.  I really love teaching AP too.  I really like my honors classes too, but AP is a great challenge and I feel that I can really teach a lot more of the nuance and fun parts for history rather than just the boring names and dates.  But this fall has been a whirlwind, trying my best to get ahead of AP students in really knowing the content before I teach it.  Now the big challenges are trying to cover the big idea things without hopefully skipping over other minor things that might be on the test, providing them with enough information to prepare them without completely overwhelming them with so much information, and trying to make class more than just notes and reading, and more notes and reading.  I've been lucky to find some really good and organized teachers that teach APWH online and through twitter to steal some of their ideas, or at the very least, validate what I've been doing.  I even created a website for my AP students to keep all of the things in one place for them, notes, assignments etc.  The new site has probably been one of the big things that have drawn me away from my blog here, but it's been really good for the students, their parents, and anyone else trying to keep up with the class.  I'm also hoping that in the spring as we get into more modern history, I can find more ways to make the content memorable and fun and engaging for the students too.

I know one big thing I want/need to do more of are class discussions/simulations.  We had a really good debate on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and we have a State Building simulation coming up that I'm very excited about doing.  The students will have to be various foreign leaders from all over the world in the pre-Industrialization time period.  Should be fun.  I think another one I'll do is have the students be various African nations and they will have to convince me as the imperial power to come and make a deal with their country to establish a colony peacefully.  Should lead to good discussions and hopefully the students will more importantly learn about the Early Modern leaders and the Scramble for Africa that way rather than just reading about it.  I'm sure I have lots of things to reflect and say, but trying to come up with them all now seems impossible.  My big resolution after trying to get back in shape is to blog more regularly (I feel I've made that one before too).  Hopefully I can do better with both.  Until next time (whenever that may be, hopefully next week or two once school resumes), thanks for reading

The post before I post about school starting back up

So much for well intended plans.  My early summer blogging plans were to write down and chronicle our adventures of daddy daycare.  I guess I underestimated my time.  Chasing around the twins is certainly tiresome and any down time has been spent starting to prepare for the upcoming school year, trying to have the smallest bit of a normal social life with the wife and kids, or sleeping.  It has been really enjoyable to spend the summer with them, not the most productive as far as school preparation, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.  We survived the beach and our first birthday and are on the verge of walking.  Then the trouble will really begin for me and the Mrs.  But I digress.

Some things that have helped get me through the roughly 8 weeks with nearly no adult contact (in no particular order)

• The nursery at our gym, big thanks to the ladies who work there.  The daily break was much needed for everyone
• Arrested Development re-runs
• Nap time (not long enough most days, but beggars can't be choosers)
• The World Cup and ICC (very stoked for the upcoming BPL season
• Perusing spotify to catch up on several albums I've missed and finding new music
• And lastly, the fact that the kids can play on their own and be self-entertained or entertain one another.  The breaks every so often have allowed me to relax, work, or have some kinds of interaction through social media.

I'll have more next week when the kids go back to daycare full time.  Only 9 days until my first day at the new school and two weeks until students first day.  Very excited, a bit nervous with all this AP stuff I need to do, but we'll figure it out.  Hopefully by next week's post I'll have a concrete plan as to how the first week will go.

Summer musings

So here is kind of where we get to the "and more" parts of the blog as we're now out for summer vacation.  This will definitely be a busy summer as I'm moving schools, grade levels and districts.  I'm in some ways sad to be moving on, I met and worked with some great people and my three years at TMS shaped and molded me into the teacher I am now.  But I'm very excited about my new school, one I've actually been trying to get to for a couple of years now.  I recently found out that I'll be teaching AP World History as well along with World History.  Definitely stoked to jump not just up to high school but potentially AP.  I have to take the certification course, but it's a great new challenge.  So my summer will definitely be spent preparing for that as best I can.  Also and more importantly this summer, I've temporarily traded my somewhat stressful job with another job that is even more rewarding, challenging and stressful; and that's taking care of my twins, now 10 and a half months old.  For 7 weeks or so, it's just me and them during the day.  Hoping we all survive and I don't stunt their development too much.  So much of the posts over the next few weeks will deal with my daddy daycare side business.

So far it's been 4 days really, and so good.  First morning was a bit rough, my son is wide awake at 6 AM or so.  But we made it.  The biggest change is meals, I'll be honest, my wife has done so much with them, I still feel a bit lost.  Thankfully the kids aren't too picky and then love any and all fruits.  I of course, dislike most fruits, so I've had more interaction with peaches and pineapples than I had in my previous 33 years in just the past week now.  But we've got our little routine down, thank heaven our gym has a nursery and I have a jogging stroller that they love.  Other than that, I get to take them on errands every now and then and have people marvel as if I'm carrying something completely foreign.  Had 4 people say "got your hands full huh" at the gym today when we came in.  I get it, two babies.  It's not that uncommon, just tell me their cute and let me continue my grueling shoulder workout as I carry 30+ pounds of baby and car seat to my car.

And how bout the World Cup!  Makes it much easier to be hanging around the house with the kids.  Games have been awesome, I scared the crap out of my son when Michael Bradley's shot was cleared off the line and then Jones scored in last night's game.  Gut-wrenching tie for the USA, but with some perspective, 4 points after 2 games is a great place to be.  Hoping for a good result Thursday.  I also can't believe Spain is done.  One of my 8th graders told me that they weren't going to do well.  I thought he was crazy.  His rationale like most 8th graders is "they suck."  Which I found ironic since half of the team played for his beloved Real Madrid, but nevertheless, he was right.  And my World Cup winners were out after two games.  Good thing I don't bet money on this kind of stuff.  As of now, I see Germany over Brazil in one semi with Netherlands beating Argentina in the other.  The Dutch look really good, and my beloved USA will make the quarterfinals before losing to Messi.

Alright, that's all I got, more daddy daycare thoughts and revelations next time and probably some ideas I'm kicking around for the upcoming year.  Thanks for reading!

Quick end of the year musings

I'll probably write more in a week or so after the school year finally culminates, big news but have to wait until it can be officially stated and shared.  Last couple of weeks here are always bizarre.  We put so much emphasis it seems to our tests this time, that basically from mid-May through our final days, testing is what consumes us all.  And while I was able to spice up review a couple of times with different review games like grudgeball, the kids are so programmed to study the old-fashioned way that any deviation from it leads to chaos.  I've realized that it is obviously something that I need to establish from the beginning of the year as to how we will review.  Problem is, I don't have many tests or exams, so when we now change our focus, it makes it a bit more difficult to all of the sudden change from the status quo.  Definitely some things that I need to work on over the summer.

It has been a good year overall, I feel like I was able to bring in more engaging assignments and activities and I've learned a ton from my PLN on twitter.   Sometimes it is tough to look back on the whole year when you're crammed into the same room for 4+ hours with a group of kids that are testing or waiting while others or testing.  The boredom and the kids penchant to feel that they're already done with the year can be frustrating.  But there were a lot of really good things that I feel we accomplished this year, the March Madness project among others, and I'm grateful that my students usually went along with me whenever I felt like throwing something together last minute to try new things.  I wish them nothing but the best as most of them move onto 9th grade and my 7th graders move up to the 8th grade.  Hopefully they'll be able to look back on this year fondly and take some important lessons with them to the next grade and their next set of teachers.

As for me, I'm now just over six days away from the summer and the start of daddy daycare with the twins.  It'll be a whole new challenge and exciting times as I run around and chase them all summer as they're learning to walk, talk and all other things that 10 month-olds do.  I'll have more time over the summer, so I'll look to keep this better updated as I prepare for next year's upcoming changes and also have lots of out of the classroom stuff to discuss like playing with the kids, the World Cup and the anything and everything else.

Thanks for reading, enjoy the final days educators if you're not out for the summer already!

The end of March Madness, CCSS pondering

So my classes have finally reached the end of our March (ok most of April) Madness.  Drumroll....... and the winners are Alexander Graham Bell for our Most Influential American and Gandhi for our Most Powerful World Leader.  Overall I think the experience was a real hit.  The students loved it, I had teachers telling me how the kids were talking about their match-ups and who won and lost in their classes, and teachers were even coming by to check out the giant brackets I had up to see how the tournament was progressing.  In the end I had four really good students make the finals and make some really good and persuasive arguments for their figures.  So I'll have to make a quick stop to Subway for the winners tomorrow, and it'll be a nice reward for a long project that took us literally right up to our spring break.  I think next year I'll look to condense things a bit, and I'll definitely need to seed the participants.  For instance, we're learning about Napoleon now with my 7th graders and a lot of them are saying that he's a guy that would have gone far in our tournament but he was unfortunately matched up against Gandhi in the first round.  But it was nice to hear my students say things like "are we going to do any more projects like this, this was really good!"  It was also great to see some of my students that might not normally consider themselves smart make it deep in the tournament and surprise themselves and their classmates.  It was a big hit, and I've got my work cut out for me these last 6 weeks to come up with some good and exciting things to do.  Thankfully, when I mapped out our curriculum for the year, I purposefully saved all of the wars for our last 6 week unit.  Hopefully my hunch will pay off and we'll have some very high engagement and lots of fun too.

Also, as we're gearing up for end of grade testing now and as I sat through our latest school improvement team meeting, I got to thinking about our new Common Core Essential Standards.  Now before you assume this is just another rant about how awful the Common Core is, I'll assure you it isn't.  It's more of a question that I have for you educators, especially those that teach history and social studies.  I'd love to know what you think.  For our standards, I'll be honest, they're incredibly vague.  An example is that students need to understand how individuals and groups have brought about change in NC and the USA.  There are literally dozens if not hundreds of ways that I can show and teach that.  It creates a double-edged sword.  I as a teacher have the autonomy to teach this standard how I want really.  I can explain it though the founding fathers, the early settlers, the civil rights movement, leaders of industry, you name it.  I have the power in my classroom (and my school since I'm the dept chair) to pick and emphasize which examples through history I want to teach.  As a teacher it's great because it allows me to play to my strengths and teach maybe something I'm more passionate about that something I'm not, as long as the standard is taught, it doesn't really matter.  But that's the problem, what if what I choose to focus on isn't what the people drawing up these tests focus on.  Yes, we'd love to live in a world where our students will get the big picture ideas and carry the big idea throughout historical events, understanding how all of these events are similar because they were led by individuals or groups changing and impacting society.  But that's rarely the case.  And when my students move on to the next level, their teachers aren't asking them if they know the standards, they wondering why they don't know certain key events or people.  I have 8th graders that don't remember or swear they never learned about Gandhi.  For me, teaching Gandhi when teaching colonialism and imperialism is a no-brainer, but that obviously wasn't the case for my students' previous teachers.  It is a paradox to me.  How can I get all of this freedom to teach within a standard (and yes the state gives us examples or hints for topics and events for these standards but it is hard to turn three examples into an entire unit) but then have expectations that the students need to meet knowing certain specific topics and events?  I don't have the answer, I know that much.  But as I said, I'm interested to know what you think.  Would love to discuss this more, so please comment or track me down on twitter.

Thanks for reading, one more day until spring break and 3 days until my first edcamp.  I'm excited about that and will share my edcamp experience with you all next week.  Until then, have a great one!

March Madness!!

The Madness has begun!  We're now just over two weeks into our March Madness projects and so far, they've been pretty good.  After the initial selection process and research, we made our brackets and the fun began.  The students probably chose about 80% of the our participants.  Found a website called challonge.com to make our brackets.  It was great, just plugged in the names, and they made a completely random bracket for me, mixing all of our figures up.  For the first round, we had a couple of no shows unfortunately.  The students can still get credit for the project, but we had a deadline and whether it was due to absence or laziness, if slides weren't in my hands, then they were not submitted.  We had a few slides with some pretty serious grammar issues, and others that didn't quite follow the guidelines, and it led to some surprising first round exits from the likes of George Washington, Rosa Parks and a slew of other great Americans.  Knowing the expectations, Round 2 was phenomenally better.  All 64 slides were in on time, errors were fixed, information was updated and added.  The results were much closer too than some of the round 1 blowouts too thanks in part to the better presentations.  The google forms have been easy to use and check so I can get the results out quickly.  It has been great to hear other teachers comment how the students are so excited for about this project and are pumped if they win and really bummed out if they don't.  Also had several teacher comment how cool the project is, which is always nice to have your hard work go noticed by your colleagues.  As it stands, we're down to our final 32.  Of those 32: 12 are activists, 5 are explorers/heroes, 5 from our miscellaneous category, 4 presidents, 4 innovators, and only 2 celebrities.  It's an interesting mix for sure and I'm excited for our next rounds coming up this week.  We'll be down to the Elite 8, and then have our rounds in two weeks.  As we go farther into the project, I'll be trying to get more people from outside our classroom to add their votes and help us choose our winners.  We'll keep you posted.

Finally huge shout out to our #sstlap chats we have on Thursday are awesome.  It's a great group of educators that have pushed me to continually strive to be better and be at my best for my students.  It's been a lot of fun learning from them, and I'm excited about what lies ahead as we're now moving toward collaborating and joining forces outside of twitter too.

Thanks for reading as always, please follow me on twitter to keep up with all the goings-on from my class.

Ice storm boredom, e-books, MM update

So apparently the last three months or so, North Carolina has turned into North Dakota and no one told any of us.  I've lived or at least spent a lot of time in the various parts and climates in this country, and while NC can be incredibly helter skelter, this has been ridiculous.  I think in my first two years we lost one maybe two days tops.  We're now on day 8 and that is a low number for most of the districts around us.  We're used to 40 degree temperature changes, but rarely has it brought the ice, snow, sleet and cold that this winter/early spring has brought.  So we're out again today and it'll of course be in the 60's by the end of the week.  And since our daycare is through one of the community colleges in our area, they stay open and closed with the school.  So it's daddy daycare again.  Last time I did this, the twins were pretty young still.  Now my son is nearly crawling, both are much more active so the job is a little more difficult although they can now entertain themselves and one another a bit better.  It's a joy to stay home with them, but I know I'll be completely worn out by tonight by them too.  The only downside is I'm sure that our daycare bill will be the same even though my wife or I have had to stay home with them during these closings.  Such is life I guess.  Been a fun morning chasing my son around and occasionally finding sometime to play on the Google web store to get some new extensions and apps while they took their morning nap.  A big fan so far of following extentions:

• Shorten Me - shortens your url when needing to copy and paste it
• todoist - daily organizer and to do lists
• save to Drive - not bad but is only good for pages with no links.  Great for copying articles, texts, recipes, etc
• Send from Gmail - so outlook stops coming up
• Google calendar - easy way to add stuff rather than opening a new tab

On another money gripe, kudos for whoever came up with the idea that graduate students have to pay to graduate.  Wish I could have been there for that meeting.  Gee, we're getting tuition money from these students that we don't have to house or feed...how else can we stick it to them though.  It just doesn't seem like it's enough.  But I digress, complaining isn't going to get me anywhere, and it isn't going to get that fee to go away either.  So I'm down to just two reflective essays for my portfolio and a research paper and that's it. Roughly 5 more weeks and it'll thankfully be over with.  There have definitely been some things I wouldn't have learned without these classes, but there have also been some filler and other parts that really just reassured or reiterated what I already knew or taught.  Probably the biggest thing that I took from all this, was I learned how to create an e-book.  They are time consuming to make, but it is a great way to have your students learn about any kind of content and they are great for different learning styles as you can add audio and pictures to the entire thing for those that are EC or are just more visual learners or audio learners.  I did one in one of my classes for the Cold War, as just a way to introduce what the Cold War was and a lot of the key vocabulary that comes with it.  I think that over the summer when I get some time I'll look to make more of these.  At least that's the plan, we'll see how much time the twins really give me to do anything this summer.

In the classroom, we've assigned our American figures yesterday and started our research.  Unfortunately, Mother Nature was kept me from see my 7th graders, so we'll be moving things around yet again, but eventually we'll start up with our Most Powerful World Leader bracket as well.  I plan to post as much as I can here and on twitter.  I'm hoping that by sharing our progress and results, the students will take this a bit more seriously.  I know that a majority will because they are driven to do well and/or better their classmates, but hopefully this can get everyone on board to do well.  I also added a smack talk wall for the project, it should be fun to see them enjoy that part of it.  I'll have updates from both classes next week with where we are in our tournaments, I'm hoping to have the voting start of April.

Alright, back to chasing the kids around, this post has taken about 3 hours to write with all the stops.  Have a good one

March Madness Time, Student Creativity

Don't have a very long post as I'm working on grad school work, but I wanted to share these which I'm really excited about.  I'm a huge college basketball fan and obviously there is no greater time than March Madness.  If I could, I'd show games all day that first Thursday and Friday.  So many underdogs and the games are constant from noon til 11 or so at night.  It's awesome.  So what better way to bring some of this excitement to my students than to set up a march madness contest/project.

Our next two units are a bit slower paced, so I'm hoping to use them at least for 8th grade as a way to be kind of a catch all unit since we've flown through so many things, so quickly the first 4 units.  For 7th grade, I'll combine governments, world leaders into our last unit of wars and conflict to keep them engaged too.  I hope these are fun, I've randomly given each student a number that put them in one of the categories for each project.  The students will then nominate our persons (although for 7th grade since it's a new unit, I'll probably add some leaders for them).  Once each student has their person, I'll use print my brackets to randomly match everyone up.  The brackets will be big, 96 for my 8th graders and 48 for 7th.  Here are the links to both sites.  Thanks to @Braz74 and @SofiaGeorgelos for their inspiration and ideas for this project.  I've tweaked their work to create this.  Hopefully I can repay the favor some day with what I come up with.

Most Influential American https://sites.google.com/site/marchmadness8thgrade/
Most Powerful Leader in World Historyhttps://sites.google.com/site/rowesmarchmadness7thgrade/

Lastly, I got some really good projects for our Social Change project.  While I still had quite a few of the boring old power points, I had some students go out on a limb as I told them I'd reward them for creativity.  Had nearly a dozen students create flipagrams through instagram to due slideshows and use that for their biographical projects.  I was also pleased to have some students choose some lesser known people rather than just MLK and Rosa Parks, which I was really glad to see as well.  It's definitely inspired me to do this again and try to continue to push the students to be creative and try to show their knowledge in ways other than the boring status quo.

Thanks for reading, time for bed.

Fishbowl, Student projects and Olympics Update

So we've tried some new things in the classroom, with varying levels of success.  I'd seen the idea several different places using fishbowl discussions as a way to change the class to more student centered rather than just me lecturing.  So I thought I'd give it a try.  We're in the middle of our Social Change unit and in the short amount of time that we have we really don't have the time to talk about all of the important figures that impacted our country.  So I thought this could be a neat way for the students to do some quick research and discuss about a person that they didn't really know about and what all they did.  The premise seems good enough, the kids at first seemed alright with it.  Gave the kids about a class and a half to learn just some simple facts about the person of their choice, only restriction was that each person in the small groups had to have a different person to research and discuss.  The kids seemed to enjoy the research, I put some good questions stems up on the board to help the discussion.  Rules were, inside group would discuss each of their persons and had to ask one another a question.  Well, the results were mixed.  I was really excited that my class I thought would struggle the most, actually ended up doing the best.  But for the most part, the discussion wasn't really a discussion.  It was very static and the kids spoke so quietly, it frustrated their classmates (and me).  I've told them we would be doing this again, so hopefully the next time, we'll scaffold and model some more discussion and better expectations for it.  (Which I admit, I didn't really do, I just threw it out there like most things, and see what works and what needs tweaking)  On that note though, I am very excited about seeing what my students do for their bigger Social Change project.  They can either do a biography on a person or choose a song and analyze the lyrics to show how they (or possibly could) speak about Civil/Equal Rights.  I know plenty will do the boring old power points, but I've had some ask about doing flipagrams, prezis and others so I'm excited to see some of them be creative.

My 7th graders have done fairly well with our Winter Olympics project.  Their presentations and country projects went fairly well (they at least spoke loud enough for everyone to hear them).  The problem was it takes forever to get them settled in, so we didn't get to do our biathlon event yet.  So that'll be tomorrow, we'll have the kids run and try to hit some targets with a tennis ball, run some more and hit the targets again.  We have some key battles for first.  The one thing I would go back and change is giving them the medal scores for their grades near the beginning, I have some kids that of course now want to do better since after doing very little at the beginning of the week, they realize they're looking at a D or F.  But it went fairly well and I think I'll continue it even without the Olympics going on next year.  Below are the medal counts that we have in the room.

Lastly, I'm trying something else new, a class instagram.  A few in my Social Studies PLN have said they've used it to help update what's going on in the classroom and so I'll give it a try.  Anyway that I can get the kids hopefully connected and engaged in the classroom.  We'll see how it goes.  

Thanks for reading, it's late and I need to turn in.  Enjoy the week everyone.

Catching up thanks to Mother Nature

So we had the first full week of school for the first time in it seems like a month here, and the snow and weather have played havoc.  While it is nice to have the break on occasion, the shorten days make my short block even shorter and challenging to get stuff done.  It did allow me some time to take part in lots of twitter chats and get new ideas for the classroom.  I've been intrigued with the idea of gamification in the classroom and how I can bring competition into my room to hopefully push my students engagement and desire to learn.  So with the Winter Olympics going on, I thought it'd be a perfect way to integrate this for my 7th graders.  My 7th graders have been a chore this year.  It's a new content for me, so you add that to what is the usual craziness of 7th grade and it is stressful to say the least some days.  So rather than finding some of the traditional and probably boring ways to teach culture, we have a great competitive way to do so now.
The students were first randomly chosen and picked their countries.  I could tell that my students aren't really following the games since British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Mexico and Peru were all chosen while Sweden and Finland weren't picked in either class.  So we split it up into two weeks, week one is the training.  Students had to learn some of the general information about their country along with several different parts of their culture, the country's rivals and how they were doing in Sochi.  The students will get a medal for how in depth their information was and can earn bonus medals for explaining why the cultural expressions were so important in their country. I have a PD day on Monday, so we had to move our opening ceremonies back a day.  The students also have to make or recreate their countries flag and we'll have them walk in to our arena.  I'm hoping the games go over well.  They'll have the trivia competition tomorrow, our Opening Ceremonies will be Tuesday and the students will give short presentations about what they learned on Tuesday and Wednesday.  I've set up a biathlon for Thursday where the students will have to race and also hit targets (tennis balls at coke bottles) and we'll use our classroom bball hoop for some Pop-a-shot finale.  If nothing else, it'll get them out of the classroom for a bit.  Hopefully it'll be fun, I'll try to get some good pictures.
My 8th graders continue to impress.  We used the www.mission-us.org interactive histories and used the story of Lucy and her journey as a runaway slave.  The kids loved it, they loved the story, were furious when they got caught or Lucy messed up, and asked some great questions to Lucy as our ticket out the door.  The next day we learned about John Brown, and they again we're interested, asked great questions.  Had students leave the room saying "that was cool, we should learn more about guys like him."  Glad to know they're liking it and learning a bit too.  I also started using Remind101 and it's been really good.  I definitely recommend it to anyone.
Alright, back to grad school work and papers.  Thanks for reading, I'll have the Olympics results next weekend!

I love flubaroo, more genius hour, etc

First, it's been a great day.  I wasn't too stoked about getting up with my son at 6:55, but we were able to watch our beloved Liverpool FC thrash (as the English commentators say) the gunners 5-1 and then were able to see our Tar Heels win their sixth straight.  Along with that, I was able to participate in my first #satchat and I was not disappointed.  There was some great discussion about PLN and I felt that I was able to hear some great points, and make some new connections that I'm excited about as my PLN continues to grow.  Unfortunately, my day is ending with daddy daycare, as my wife gets a much needed night out with the girls while I stay home with the twins and do grad school work.  And play around with my blog, you'll see I finally figured out how to spruce things up.

Anyway, onto what I wanted to write about, FLUBAROO.  It is awesome.  I was introduced to this from the folks I follow that were at edcampwi.  They showed off the website youpd.org which is a phenomenal resources with tons of tutorials and all kinds of educational stuff.  But a couple guys mentioned flubaroo and so I thought I'd check it out as it was mentioned as a cool way to grade work on Google forms.  I was already planning on using Google forms this semester, as a better way that I can track student understanding at the end of each week.  These are just short little quizzes, formative assessments really so I can see what all I need to go back over before our Common Formative Assessments or unit tests.  But grading and going through 6 classes worth each Friday was going to be a nightmare.  Thankfully, flubaroo does it for me.  You have to download Google Scripts first, and it can be somewhat tedious having to add the flubaroo script each time you want to use.  But once it is set up, all you have to do is answer your questions on the form, and when you run the script, it will use your answers as the key and automatically grades it all.  You get your data in seconds.  It is such a time saver and now I'm able to view this data, sometimes before class is even over.  I'm excited about what I'll be able to do with this now going forward, I think I may move the quiz up a day to Thursday so I can use Fridays to help those that need it.  Point is, flubaroo is great, I link my Google forms to my webpage and the students can easily access them and I can get them graded rather quickly, so I can focus on other things.  Here is the link to flubaroo and it's pretty simple instructions to follow from there.

Week 2 with genius hour was been better.  I showed them to Joy Kirr's blog that I mentioned last posting and I think a lot of kids opened their eyes up to what we're trying to do with the time.  The next two days, we went to the library for the students to check out books or online resources and on Wednesday they updated me where they were on a Google Form, telling me what they were doing and what, if anything, they needed from me.  I was out on Thursday due to our twins 6 month check-up so that was where we stopped things for the week.  I'm hoping that this week, we will be able to do a little bit more work, and more importantly, poll the students as to how they will eventually want to share their experiences and start to set that aspect of this up.  I'm thinking about potentially getting with other classes through skype or something else so that we can see how other students are using genius hour and if we can learn anything from it and share our ideas as well.

Our debates went really well last week, the kids did way better than I thought, some really got into it, using their best cop voice and everything.  A lot were still shy and didn't say much, but I think it'll get better as we do these more often.  I also posted pictures of our tweets on the Great Depression.  Had some really good ones that I'd share but I need to find a way to black out the students' names.  But I was really pleased and the kids again enjoyed this activity too.  We're going to try grudgeball on Monday to review for our Common Formative Assessment, and both my 7th and 8th graders are making PSA's on personal finance.  They all were excited about the project, and I'm looking forward to hearing about their ideas and scripts Monday and video shoots on Tuesday.  Should be a fun week as we will get into Social Change, slavery and the Civil Rights movement, which is always an interesting and great unit for us.

As always, thanks for reading, let me know what you think here or on twitter @amcrowe5

Debates in the classroom, genius hour beginning, and other stuff

I tend to usually just use this blog to reflect upon my experiences in the classroom and share any ideas with anyone that actually reads this.  Today I'm going to go in a bit of a different direction for the first part.

I've been inspired of late to try and have more speaking and debating/discussion in my classroom.  I found some great ideas through some of the twitter chats that I partake in, this one coming from our Thursday night #sstlap discussions.  There were a lot of great ideas thrown out there, but I really liked the something that @MSHistoryTeache said he's used debate styles similar to those on Pardon the Interruption.  PTI was one of my favorite sports shows for years, and to be honest, I couldn't believe I hadn't ever thought about using something from the show in my class.  My mind has been spinning with ideas since then, having weekly debates, do heads on sticks, good cop/bad cop, the list goes on.  In the past I've used 4 corners to get the class up, but it's usually dominated by those that want to talk/argue while the rest can hide and ride their coattails in the discussion.  This way, it adds more accountability.  I knew I needed to learn a bit more on ways to really get the kids talking, and more importantly preparing to put their words and arguments down to be successful, especially those that don't like to speak or don't really think before they speak (these are middle school students after all).  So after doing some research, I found this website.  It had some great techniques, rules and different debate themes.  As I mentioned, I have used 4 corners and want to use more role play.  I really liked the outer/inner circle style as well.  It allows for good discussion and gets the rest of the class to actively listen while they take notes on the topic of discussion.  I'm introducing the PTI style next week with a Good Cop/Bad Cop on child labor.  Will choose debate partners, and the students will have a short amount of time to research and I've found a random name generator classtools.net to help pick who will debate each time so everyone will eventually get a turn.  We'll see how it goes, but I know that I'm excited about this.  I want my students to be able to learn how to positively express themselves and their opinions.  Hopefully this will help.

Secondly, I'm attempting to start a genius hour in my class.  We have 15 minutes each day with my homeroom that we've used to read, but we haven't had the kind of choice I'd like with this time, and I want to offer my students a choice in what we do as well.  I've tried to gently introduce this and it hasn't really gone over how I'd hoped.  I asked them first what they'd like to do with the time if they had a choice and they wrote their answers down on a notecard and I collected them up.  My only stipulations were that we weren't going to extend lunch, no naps, and no we couldn't go outside and just hang out, it had to be educational in some way or form.  Most answered the question as if this would be something everyone would be doing together.  So a lot of responses were either "do my homework" or "play Social Studies jeopardy."  While I am excited that so many want to play jeopardy and perhaps they'll learn a little bit along the way, I think many of these answers were focusing on what I maybe wanted to hear rather than what the students actually wanted to do.  So I rephrased the question and a only slightly more success.  I had one that wants to read more, a couple that want to learn a new language, a couple want to cook.  Most still either have no clue or want to do homework.  I think on Monday when we have time again I'll show them some posts about genius hour from Joy Kirr's blog.  Hopefully this and maybe a quick library trip can spark some more ideas and creativity.  We'll see, so far we're off to a rocky start, but we haven't given up yet.

I think I'll wrap it up there, next time I'll talk more about our google form quizzes and the awesomeness of flubaroo (assuming it works in action, rather than just my test run).  Please let me know what you think, feel free to leave a comment or find me on twitter @amcrowe5  Thanks for reading

The Semester's End, a quick reflection

So the first semester has come to an end.  It was definitely a interesting and sometimes chaotic with all life has thrown at me outside the classroom (in a really great way of course, but twins are no joke, we play straight up man to man defense on them instead of zone).  Added to that, we switched up the pacing guides and maps to a more thematic approach, and am teaching 7th grade along with my usual 8th grade.  So it was hectic to say the least, scrambling during my morning planning to finish a lesson or completely throw together something, especially for 7th grade since I have it at the end of the day.  All in all there have been some really good things and definitely a lot of room for growth which I'll take into next semester.

First the good:
Technology in the classroom - We've had a bunch of really good things happen as far as this goes. We were fortunate to where we've become the guinea pigs for being a potential 1:1 classroom.  I'd say we've had laptop access roughly 75% percent of the semester, although the computers stay in my room rather than go home with the kids.  We've been able to successfully use both gaggle and google drive for assignments.  Google Drive has been great as we've done collaborative work in partners, small groups and even as an entire class.  It definitely has put a nice spin on some of the projects we've done and added some engagement to the boring old KWL chart, where now everyone has to be involved and participate.

After a rocky start with our first unit, the thematic units have gone pretty well.  The students haven't really struggled too much with the idea that we're bouncing around time periods.  It's been a lot easier to come up with our common assessments too which we have to base off of the NCES.  Rather than have several standards that we may touch on in a week, we can focus on just 1 or 2 and their clarifying objectives.  There is definitely ways to improve and go deeper into some topics next year, but I've been pleased with how they've gone this year so far.

Now the opportunities for growth, to use my administrative cliches:
7th grade in general hasn't gone well.  Mostly because of what I mentioned earlier where I'm not really able to plan out or be as effective as I'd like to be.  I've found some really good ideas, lessons, and projects, but I've thrown some of these in without the kind of proper scaffolding that they need at this level.  I think the content is interesting and there are lots of things that I can do for world history, I just need to take some of these lumps to really improve my final product for next year.  Luckily the last 3 units will help, as we're going over Economic & Social Change, Governments & Leadership, and lastly War & Conflict.  The first and last units are the same as my coinciding 8th grade units, obviously focusing on world views rather than national and state ones. Hopefully some of the tweaks I plan to make along with the content will help my student engagement and overall learning in my classroom.

I've used the technology as a crutch sometimes, which I need to stop and get back to teaching rather than just simply assign a project or assignment and completely sit back and facilitate.  There has to be a balance of this, but at the middle school level, they still need me teaching, explaining, guiding them along the stories of history rather than just showing them where to go online and assume that they can all come up with adequate outcomes from the readings or projects I assign or create.

So some fixes for the next 90 days!

1. I'm going to use my whiteboard more as a place where I and my students to put down ideas to go along with the smart board we have.  For much of the year it's just been the place I've kept my learning targets/I Can statements and really has become a wasted space.  This way there is more that I can do, more movement for me and the students, etc.
2. Students will have to write down the learning targets/I Can statements each day for the week, and I'll have more quick formative assessments to make sure that they students actually are understanding what they are supposed to be learning.  I think on Fridays I'll even have a little quiz (not a fan or quizzes but hopefully it'll be easy grades for class if I do this correctly) or something to help review them.  It'll help them learn and I can make sure that I'm teaching the standards like I'm supposed to be but doing it in the fashion that I want.  
3. We did timelines at the beginning of the year and as I've mentioned it was a bit of a disaster.  So I took them all down and I think that I'll put up just white paper.  Not sure what I want to do with it yet, maybe a place for formative assessments, students to show work, whatever.  I got the idea from Dave Burgess and his outstanding Teach Like a Pirate book.  I'm sure I can turn it into something fun.
4. I need to really work on my transition times, there are times I get stagnant or I take a minute or two too long to do something and I lose the class for that moment and have to bring them back.  And when you only have 40 minutes or so, each minute is even more precious.  Definitely going to work on my hooks and everything else to get them working and moving along as smoothly as middle schoolers will allow.
5. Lastly, I have this 15 minute block with my homeroom that we're supposed to use for reading and literacy, but I think I'm going to try to use that time for genius hour.  I've been really intrigued by what I've read on twitter about it, and I think it's the right group of kids that we could read or do current events a couple days a week and then genius hour the rest of the time.  We'll see how it goes, I definitely will be writing about that a bunch I'm sure.

Well that's what I got, hope to make 2nd semester better than the first.  Thanks for reading, would love to hear any feedback or ideas to spice things up if you have them.

Rainy day and a sick baby....good combo

Seems like a good day to write, it's incredibly gray and rainy here and little girl has a slight fever and cough, so it's been a fun day so far.  We've been fortunate that this is the first real illness and we shudder to think how our son is going to handle it if he gets sick as he's much louder and more dramatic about things.  Could make what was going to be an action-packed week even longer.

Our grading period and 6 weeks ends on Thursday and both 7th and 8th grade classes are finishing projects, have to prepare for their unit tests and I have to administer our school's common formative assessments (just a retake thankfully for 7th grade).  The projects have been a mixed bag.  I think the 8th graders have really enjoyed the Zombie Apocalypse geography project. Here's a link to the project, any and all comments or feedback on it are greatly appreciated https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xwKHEfE7bZRG-F5jheywkW7f1vY37NRK-AymZg552gU/edit#slide=id.p  But I've had a lot of students make the connection to choosing locations based on geographic reasons rather than "hey I like Florida so I'm going to Florida."  The kids have enjoyed using the scribble maps to track the spread of the zombie virus as well as show their migration route across the country.  It's also eye-opening that as I'm introducing this project, how many of my students ask me "is this real?"  Their fears were finally put to ease when I asked if they really thought I could break this news before twitter or the national media could.  The students are in the final phase where they are writing about how they chose their location, what the geography of their location is like and what are the similarities and differences between their treks and those by the original settlers.  I'm excited to see what connections have been made, from tracking the students so far, I've seen very few if any students that don't have a majority of their projects ready to turn in.

My 7th grade empire project has been a mixed bag,  It's really hard to gauge because my 7th graders are all over the place.  Some are high flyers, some are seat-warmers and the majority float between the two depending on the day and their mood.  I've learned the hard way that they need as much structure as possible.  I hope as the year goes on I can loosen the reigns but they really seem to be able handle the old-school approach of notes and lectures or articles and questions to answer.  I definitely will need to restructure some things for 2nd semester and find more activities that keep them busy, jigsaws and controlled movement, stuff like that.

We'll see how these projects end up and how the week goes.  Baby girl is sleeping, so I'm going to take her cue.  Go Liverpool and Go Niners!

Thanks for reading