Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

Created by Wordpandit.com As I was on my way home for Thanksgiving, I was flipping through Pinterest, I came across the image to the right and I thought to myself: Darn it. That's what I should of done for my government PBL... To back up, one of my first projects as a teacher at a fully project-based school was titled: We, the People of Mars ... This project was geared towards my sophomores in World History and the driving question was "How can we as inhabitants of a new planet create a functional government?" The goal was for students to investigate different types of governments around the world to create their own unique government for Mars.  My inspiration came from the PBL training provided BIE,  where my colleagues and I created a project according to their organizational format. After a very helpful brainstorm with another teacher, they pointed me in the direction of Mars One , an international project that hopes to one day settle humanity Mars that would ...

Presentations are synonymous with teaching, especially during the NCLB era when I got my teaching credential. Without question, PowerPoint was an unspoken tool that every teacher needed to be competent in. So naturally I used PowerPoint all the time for my direct instruction. During my student teaching, however, I began to get bored with PowerPoint. My presentations seemed repetitive and boring to me, which  would mean it was incredibly boring for my students. I started desperately looking around for new templates, themes, backgrounds, anything that would jazz up my PowerPoints. Around that time, I had a classmate use this interesting presentation tool that was so fascinating. It would zoom in and out then flow from slide to slide. In all honesty, the information itself wasn't that interesting, but I was engaged because I wanted to see what would happen next. At the end of class, I found that it was Prezi . I forced myself to learn how to use it and tried using it a few times for...