Creating Interactive SMART Board Lessons - Workshop

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.

NJCSS Workshop

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.

I'm Published!

I'm published in the latest issue of "Journal of Interactive Learning Research": 

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.

Here's the to the article link: http://www.editlib.org/j/JILR/v/23/n/4.

Finally, here's the official citation:

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.