Upcoming Community College Classes

My course schedule was published today by Raritan Valley Community College.  My classes are on page 6 (under "Education") on this downloadable PDF: http://www.raritanval.edu/uploadedFiles/cce/cfa/personal-enrichment_fall2012_class-listing.pdf.

Cape Cod Vacation Photo Book

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly baby photo books are the perfect way to preserve your baby's precious moments.

Cape Cod Vacation

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:

http://youtu.be/rPKgEUX4F1M

Reading Like A Historian Curriculum

Education Week is spotlighting Stanford University's Reading Like A Historian Curriculum. I began to use the materials last spring and plan on using it all next year, starting September. It's a great introduction to DBQs (document-based questions).

Here's the link to EdWeek article: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/07/30/37socialstudies.h31.html?tkn=RTCC6r%2BHufOfbe0OwJYn8pKYTLTzy8Qppb%2FQ&cmp=clp-sb-ncss

Here's the link to the curriculum materials: http://sheg.stanford.edu/?q=node/45

Mister Rogers' Viral Video

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.

Age of Exploration Movie Trailers

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:

NJ History Fair - Washington Crossing State Park

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NJ Higher Education Showcase of Exemplary Practices: Excellence in Teacher Preparation

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.

Using "Assassin's Creed" to Teach the Renaissance

New Media Literacy
This project was inspired by Dr. Henry Jenkins' book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.  Jenkins writes about "participatory" fan communities, such fanfiction.net and the unofficial Harry Potter fan site, MuggleNet, in his white paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.  A new collection of fan-made wiki sites, devoted to movies, books, video games, etc. can be found on the site Wikia. 

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 popular open-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)

Links to my student's finished wiki pages:

• farber7th.pbworks.com/ACRen1 
• farber7th.pbworks.com/ACRen2 

Examples of My Sixth-Grader's Downloadable Character Wikis:

• Leonardo da Vinci
• Dante Alighieri
• Galileo Galilei
• Nicholas Copernicus
• Niccolò Machiavelli
• Isaac Newton

Mall Pride

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.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

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!

Watch Meet the Man Behind Elmo on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

New Jersey Council for the Social Studies (NJCSS)

I found out this week that I am now one of the North Jersey Directors of the New Jersey Council for the Social Studies (NJCSS)!

Follow my NJCSS tweets here: https://twitter.com/NJCSSNetwork

James Paul Gee on Learning with Video Games

“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."

http://youtu.be/JnEN2Sm4IIQ

A Parent's Guide to 21st-Century Learning

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:

• A Parent's Guide to 21st-Century Learning | Edutopia

FlipSnack Interactive Magazine Project

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/

Below are a couple of student examples:

http://snack.to/fznqosy8

http://snack.to/fzkad0wl

Guest Speaker: NJ Assemblyman Anthony Bucco

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

Glogster Edu Mini-Grant

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!

iPads in K8 Education Workshop

I guess it's the sign of the times...  On Monday, February 27th, I will be giving a workshop at the the Morris County Educational Technology Training Center called "iPads in K8 Education" (link: http://tinyurl.com/88hw5n5).   

Here's the official course description:

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.

The Virtual Student Constitution

Last week my seventh grade students collaborated online to create a "Virtual Student Constitution" on a collaborative wiki (a wiki is basically an online document that more than one person can edit).  The project was framed around a current event, based on an article in the Guardian, Mob rule: Iceland crowdsources its next constitution: Country recovering from collapse of its banks and government is using social media to get citizens to share their ideas.

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.

Here is the link to the final revision of their wiki: https://farbercon2012.wikispaces.com/

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..."

Follow @NJCSSNetwork

In addition to my own Twitter account, @MatthewFarber, I am now also managing the New Jersey Council for the Social Studies's Twitter feed!  If you are on Twitter, please follow.  Here's the link: https://twitter.com/#!/NJCSSNetwork

Follow @NJCSSNetwork