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.