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.