Teacher educator Christopher Martell recently tweeted a call for collaboration: We need to build better bridges between historians and social studies teachers/teacher educators, so they know what we do. Starting this today! For the next month, I will follow a new historian each day and hopefully they will follow me back. Join me @NCSSNetwork folks! […]
Category: Instructional Design
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Another flip
In February with time running down in the second, and final, trimester of AP Euro I did something that I should have done long before: I devoted two class periods to student textbook reading. This seems to fly in the face of my embrace of constructivism, my desire for students to meaningfully engage in […]
There is more than one way to flip a classroom. While my classroom is currently far from flipped I have been pleased with the results from employing some e-learning strategies. Blending traditional, f2f classes with e-learning creates additional possibilities for the differentiated instruction that is all the rage in education these days, and curating stand […]
Presenting at a stimulating Minnesota Council for History Education workshop this week, I stressed the importance of establishing classroom routines around historical inquiry. I know this is important, because I have yet to do it fully and know the consequences. Students still find the task of critically approaching sources strange and opaque. Establishing a frequently […]
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Design Matters
As I get ready to start another e-learning course I’m thinking back to last fall’s online Politics and Law course. Beyond the communication and motivation issues, I am convinced that design of the moodle site was another barrier to student work completion. Any problems in design were exacerbated by a lower level of student tech […]
I’m continuing to reflect on how to better encouraging student work in online Politics and Law (guest access allowed) through better communication. All of my students passed the course in the recent finished trimester, but that may have been due to frequent reminders to students and parents. In a larger class I might have the time for so […]
This week I finished teaching my first online class, Politics and Law. I was lucky to work with 8 good-natured seniors, and enjoyed the experience. Throughout the class the greatest challenge that I faced was getting students to complete their assignments. In some ways this was nothing new, in most regular level classes that I […]
My mind has turned toward history teaching again this week after a summer of Online Politics and Law curriculum writing. August on the calendar has me thinking about the other classes that I will be teaching this fall: Global Studies and AP European History. And, over last weekend I reviewed some US History curriculum as […]
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Crossroads
I have been online a lot this summer, taking two online classes and writing another. I was already signed up for Instructional Design in Online Learning through UW Stout (Educ 763) as part of Stout’s E-learning and Online Teaching Certificate program when I learned that I would be writing and then teaching Online Politics and Law. […]