Our class-created book,The Corns Visit the 13 Colonies, is now live (and, global... in 50 countries!) in Apple's iBookstore!
Our book, which is historical fictional, follows Damitria the Unicorn,
Henrietta the Hippocorn, and Willamina the Shnoopacorn on an exciting
trip back in time to visit the original 13 American colonies! The book
features multi-touch widgets, like 3D movable colonial buildings, photo
galleries, an interactive student-created glossary, puzzles, a
sketchpad, and original artwork!
Each chapter and section is the result of collaboration from my 2nd
period seventh grade social studies class. Students researched and
wrote in groups, chose copyright-friendly photos, and created the
overall concept. I edited and compiled using the free Mac app,iBooks Author,
on my MacBook. Each student receives writing credit on page 40 of the
book (thanks to each parent for granting written permission).
The book is a FREE iPad download. If you have an iPad, or know someone
who does, please download it! The students are really proud of their
accomplishment!
Just got Focus: Middle School World History, a great book of economic lessons from the Council for Economic Education, for my 6th grade world history class! The lessons "use a unique mystery-solving approach to teach U.S. economic history to your high school students." It's an excellent, additional resource.
Tomorrow morning I am giving a workshop on SMART Boards at Raritan Valley Community College titled, "SMART Boards: Creating Interactive Lessons." I've given the workshop several times at different locations, but not in awhile. Should be fun!
Course Description: Go beyond SMART Board basics - learn a new way to create eye-catching lesson activities, full of customizable tools and templates that you can use to create professional-looking lessons. The Toolkit helps you create engaging content like word games, quizzes, Crossword puzzles and sorting tables. It also offers Adobe Flash tools like hide-and-reveal, drag-and-drop, plus lots more.
This Wednesday, I am giving a workshop at the NJ Council for the Social Studies (NJCSS) Annual Fall Conference (I am one of the North Jersey Directors). The conference theme is "Social Studies and the Common Core: Moving Forward" and it's being held at the Busch Campus Center, Rutgers, Piscatatway, NJ. My workshop is titled, "Social Media in the Social Studies Classroom," and will focus on building a Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) and using Edmodo in the classroom. I will also unveil the redesigned NJCSS website that I created, along with the Facebook fan page, the Twitter feed, and the Tumblr blog that I curate.
The article I co-authored is titled, Civic Participation Among
Seventh-Grade Social Studies Students in Multi-User Virtual
Environments. Here's our abstract:
Technological
advances on the Internet now enable students to develop participation
skills in virtual worlds. Similar to controlling a character in a video
game, multi-user virtual environments, or MUVEs, allow participants to
interact with others in synchronous, online settings. The authors of
this study created a link between MUVEs and participation in civic
activities by seventh grade students. This purpose of this case study
was to evaluate how face-to-face cooperative structures would translate
to an online setting. The study also assessed whether working
cooperatively in a MUVE would have an effect on student civic
participation. The virtual environment did provide an authentic setting
for students to practice the civic lessons they learned in class.
Student involvement in a participatory culture generally translated to
an increased tendency to be civic-minded.
Zieger, L. & Farber, M. (2012). Civic Participation Among
Seventh-Grade Social Studies Students in Multi-User Virtual
Environments. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 23(4), 393-410. Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
Hope everyone is enjoying summer! Last week, my family and I went to Cape Cod, as well as Plimoth Plantation. Below is a movie trailer (made with iMovie) about our trip:
As the school year winds down, Mr. Rogers reminds us, it's good to be curious about many things. Thanks PBS Digital Studios for this remix! Brilliant!
Mister Rogers Remixed - Garden of Your Mind, remixed by Symphony of Science's John Boswell.
My 6th Grade students each used Animoto to create movie trailers about an explorer during the Age of Exploration. They also made digital posters and a description of their "film."
Here's a few examples of their work:
I am proud to announce that I was nominated to be recognized in the New Jersey Higher Education’s Showcase of Exemplary Practices: Excellence in Teacher Preparation
for my "distinguished work as a New Jersey Educator." An awards
ceremony and reception will be held at the Chauncey Hotel and Conference
Center in Princeton on Friday, April 20, 2012. The purpose of the
event is "to recognize exemplary programs and practices in teacher
preparation in New Jersey, share them within the teacher education
community, and disseminate them across the state." The event is
sponsored by Acting Secretary of Higher Education Rochelle Hendricks
and the New Jersey Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. The
audience includes teacher educators, New Jersey Departments of Higher
Education and Education staff members, policymakers, funders, media, and
other stakeholders.
According to Jenkins, the New Media Literacies (NML) project "argues that media literacy skills, broadly defined, need to be integrated into school-based and after-school programs, into adult education for parents and teachers and into popular culture itself if we are going to fully address the challenges of this moment of media in transition." For more, check out NML on Twitter, @nml_usc, their website, newmedialiteracies.org, or Jenkins' blog: henryjenkins.org.
Background
"Inspired by Historical Events and Characters." This is how each game in the popularopen-world, third-party, role-playing game (RPG) Assassin's Creed series, available on Xbox 360 and PS3, begins. The Assassin’s Creed series of video games is an example of historical fiction. In historical fiction the "setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the main characters tend to be fictional" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_fiction). Examples of historical fiction range from the film "Titanic," to "Saving Private Ryan," to video games, such as "Assassin's Creed."
The storyline of the Assassin’s Creed is essentially "The Matrix" meets "The DaVinci Code." Here is the link for the game series, published by Ubisoft: assassinscreed.ubi.com. Check out this clip in which Assassin's Creed Revelations' lead script writer Darby McDevitt talks about the historical setting and people that lead character Ezio meets in the game Assassin’s Creed: Revelations: youtu.be/Kn-310RoBMY.
Below is a picture of Leonardo DaVinci with Ezio, the lead character of the games. Also appearing in the game series are Machiavelli, Copernicus, popes, members of the Borgia's, and the Medici's.
Included in the game are "databases," in which players are given historical information about people and places from the time period. Below is a screenshot from one of the game's many "databases" in Assassin's Creed II:
Using "Assassin's Creed" to Teach the Renaissance
This spring, I constructed a project-based lesson (PBL) titled The Assassin's Creed: Renaissance Character Web Project. This PBL is framed around creating additional Renaissance-era characters to further integrate into the video game series via downloadable content. The students were asked, "what if Ubisoft decided to integrate other real Renaissance figures as characters in the game?" The unit is tied to historical fiction, which makes history more "real" and relatable to middle school students. My 6th grade social studies student teams created character pages on a wiki. (Not sure what a wiki is? Watch this: www.commoncraft.com/video/wikis)
If you live near the Rockaway Mall, in Rockaway, NJ, check out the Morris County Council of Education Associations, Inc. (MCCEA) "Mall Pride" display of county-wide student work! Some of my 6th Grade's Asia: Then and Now scrapbooks are on display. Our table placement is: upper floor right in front of Precision Time and Godiva Chocolate. The display runs until April 22.
For anyone who's kid loves Elmo... Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, airing April 5 and 9, 2012 at 9pm (check local listings), on PBS' Independent Lens. Set your DVR!
“We need to bring activities and problem-solving to the worlds of chemistry and algebra -- make kids want to do things with them, to the see them as tools to surmise new possibilities -- that’s the game. If we brought those to school, they’d like it as much as Portal” - James Gee.
In the video below, James Paul Gee, a "shares insights into why video games are such effective learning tools."
What's inside the free PDF? "You’ll find a selection of outstanding online resources and projects, sorted by grade levels, to provide a glimpse of successful school programs."
To download a free copy (there's a short form to fill-out), click the following link:
Every year my 6th grade social studies students create medieval-themed magazines. For the first time I used FlipSnack to convert student work into online, interactive flipping books. Students used either PowerPoint, Word, or Publisher to layout their magazines. Next they converted the files to a PDF document. Finally, I uploaded them to my FlipSnack account. For more about FlipSnack, click here: http://www.flipsnack.com/
Today New Jersey State Assemblyman Anthony Bucco spoke to my class, as well as two other social studies classes. Assemblyman Bucco gave us all a first hand account of the state legislative process. Here is his official bio: http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/members/bio.asp?Leg=321
Today I found out that I won a PTA mini-grant to get a Glogster EDU Teacher Premium plan for my students! Glogs are basically online, interactive posters.
The Premium platform gives me full control over 200 student nicknames, classes, projects, portfolios, and presentations. Glogster is "a collaborative online learning platform for teachers and students to express their creativity, knowledge, ideas and skills in the classroom." Link: http://edu.glogster.com/
Click the picture below to see a sixth grade student example from this past fall (or, click here: edu.glogster.com/the-aztecs). Don't forget to click the embedded pictures, click the play button on the picture of the sun, and press play on the video player!
The iPad provides intriguing and interesting options for what can be done to enable student learning. Using a variety of apps, learn how to teach lessons and how to manage the use of iPads in the classroom.
My students were each given a laptop and met online (rather than face-to-face) in cooperative groups to rewrite their student handbook. The Edmodo social network was the virtual meeting place. Edmodo has the look and feel of Facebook, but it is private and secure. Students were given five other student handbooks from middle schools from around the state as a reference. Each group edited a portion of the wiki, which included both text and embedded Voki talking avatars. There was one wiki for each of my 4 seventh grade class sections. Over a 5 day period, there were 415 revisions from 94 students.
Following the project, students voted via SMART Response System interactive remote whether or not to ratify (approve) their Virtual Student Constitution wiki. The result at the end of the day was that the Virtual Student Constitution did not pass. Only 40.5% voted to ratify. A 2/3 (66.7%) vote was required to pass it. After the vote we compared the US Constitution with Iceland's new draft of their constitution which, interestingly, begins with the phrase, "We, the people who inhabit Iceland..."
This morning my 6th grade class had the opportunity to videoconference via Skype with Kim Cofino, a teacher in Japan. According to Kim's Twitter bio, she is an "international school educator, currently technology and learning coach at Yokohama International School in Japan." You can follow Kim's Twitter feed: @mscofino and read her blog: http://kimcofino.com/blog/.
First, we located Kim's school on our SMART Board using Google Earth's "street view." There is a 14 hour time difference between New Jersey and Yokohama, Japan. Yokohama is a large city adjacent to Tokyo. The Skype chat was also on our SMART Board. My students had a list of prepared questions to ask Kim. At the conclusion of the lesson, students wrote down what they learned (the lesson was basically framed as a KWL).
Thanks again for staying up late to Skype with us, Kim!
(On a technology side note, my stapler broke this morning, but our Skype chat across the globe to Japan went seamlessly! Go figure!)
The volume includes "a CD with primary source documents, overheads, student handout, maps and illustration, as well as a DVD." Each case study "provides a detailed historical background, short biographies of key historical figures, an examination of the issues and perspectives, and an analysis of the consequences, along with questions for discussion and a list of additional resources."
