Today, I debuted a new lesson on the Second Plague Pandemic. While it is definitely a work in progress, I was excited to do more than survive the day. For this lesson my goal was for students to understand more about the medieval Eurasian plague, while also wrapping their minds around how the construction of […]
I am excited about my position with Fiveable, because it brings together the animating ideas from the beginning of this blog—the pedagogic possibilities presented by e-learning—with my current focus on globalizing and decolonizing World History curricula.
A recent activity in my AP World History classes brought together the original and the current foci of this blog: online pedagogy and decolonizing history curricula. Students in my classes (54 kids), another class in my building (16) and two classes at another school in my district (47) discussed revolutions and the Enlightenment in small […]
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 […]
I use teacher candidates to differentiate classes more frequently, because we can provide supervision and instruction for two groups simultaneously.
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 […]
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 […]
I am nearing the end of my my first trimester teaching a blended Politics and Law class. The blend is two days a week in a Cisco TelePresence room with the other days online. The technology is truly impressive; interactions with students at three other remote sites became natural very quickly. The students seem to […]