Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

The Cold War: a complex event that lasted over forty years with a wide variety of players and foreign policies. An event that has lasting-effects that we still witness and experience. So as a teacher with the school year coming to an end, I was torn on how to cover such a complicated event with one project. The year before I would have just lectured about the Cold War, which was easy for me and painful for the kids. Besides, nowadays "if we have an Internet connection, we have fingertip, on-demand access to an amazing library that holds close to the sum of human knowledge," as said by Will Richardson in Why School?  So obviously that wasn't a viable option. But how could I expose students to the variety of events in the Cold War without just telling them all about. Of course, I started doing research on ways other #pbl teachers have used the Cold War, but either I wasn't inspired by the project or I had already done something similar with another project. I sea...

For whatever reason, I have always wanted my students to do a children's book, but never found the time. Then, with the SBAC testing and my department's agreement to try out project based learning, I threw my project idea into the ring and we decided to do a children's book regarding a US topic during the Cold War. I imagined using Storify to have students create their books, since my goal is to integrate technology whenever possible, but with no technology access during SBAC testing we decided to go "old school" and I'm so glad we did. I don't think my students would have been as creative and free to express their ideas if we had used technology. The first step of project was to have students select their Cold War topic, which they did using Google Forms. I was eager to try the Choice Eliminator, but found out quickly that the add-on does not work as quickly as I hoped so I ended up having to quickly problem solve and adapt the form so students made the...