Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

If you follow me on Twitter , then I'm sure that you are well aware that I attend the National CUE Conference in Palm Springs last week (#CUE16). I've been a member of CUE for the last two years and attended conferences and edcamps put on by its affiliate in the Central Valley, but this was the first time that I ever attended one of its national events. Representing Minarets at #cue16 :) #minaretsrocks #Mustangpride pic.twitter.com/530iMrN0Yd — Kaitlin Morgan (@missmorgan810) March 17, 2016 To put it simply, #cue16 was like the CVCUE Conferences and GAFE Summits that I have attended, but on steroids. Everyone was there for the same reasons: to learn new tools and techniques for the classroom, to network and collaborate with fellow teachers, and to share their excitement and enthusiasm for edtech, teaching, and learning. I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little nervous that I would be lonely since I was the only one attending from my school, but these shared inte...

For many people, diseases and history are not two topics that go together; diseases are a scientific topic while history is, you know, the study of dead people. But if you examine the human experience throughout the centuries, you see that diseases have affected societies in a variety of ways. Since many of these historical diseases have been eradicated or cured with vaccines, the social effects of have been forgotten. But now we are seeing a reemergence of these diseases for a variety of reasons. Because of this connection, my sophomore students investigated disees and their effects as part of their project based learning of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike prior projects, this knowledge was not kept within the confines of the classroom; the final projects were donated to Valley Children’s Hospital in hopes of spreading awareness about historical diseases. The project was launched in November with a PearDeck where students viewed of several news reports of recent outbreaks: ...

By far one of my favorite historical simulations to do is the trench warfare simulation for WWI. Initially, the thought of allowing students to turn the classroom into a war zone made me hesitant to do the simulation, but I finally took a deep breath in 2014 and decided to try it out.* I began the class period with the following presentation to have some order to the madness. From my first experiences, I highly recommend that you go over the rules and expectations BEFORE the trench construction begins. With all of the student excitement and noise, it is difficult to get their attention, especially if they begin hiding in the trenches; I would divide up the classroom and allow construction and then it was herding cats to get everyone to refocus for more direction. The main rules I have is that when the lights are on nothing is thrown, but when the lights go off and the war begins then its fair game. As I said, explain everything THEN allow construction to begin. Even thoug...

In 2014, I have experimented with student blogging and loved it, minus one thing: how long it took me to grade. For each student, I would have to find their blog (typically collected into a Google Form), find the specific post (hopefully I didn't far behind in grading), read it and then find them in the grading system to enter the grade. This became twice as time consuming when I had students commenting on each other's blog as assignments. I tried having students copying and pasting their comments into a spreadsheet so I could keep better track, but many students forgot, pretended that they wrote a comment, or messed with each other's responses since it was an all access spreadsheet. I even tried doing everything in a spreadsheet where each student had a custom tab, but this was difficult to manage with seven classes and I wanted students to actually be publishing on a blog. After about three years, I feel like I have finally perfect system for myself: I have students p...

As January 24 quickly approaches, I have been re-watching The X-Files , one of my favorite television shows. While I could go on and on about all of the things I love about the series, one of my favorites is its ability to get the viewer thinking; regardless of how many times I have watched Mulder and Scully race to uncover the truth, I'm left contemplating something new. This time I've realized how I want my students to be like Mulder and Scully. In case you are unfamiliar, Fox Mulder is a strong believer in the supernatural while Dana Scully is a strong believer in the scientific method. With most of their cases, Mulder and Scully are obviously at odds with each other; one advocating for the science-fiction explanation and the other advocating for the science-reality explanation. As the show develops, both Mulder and Scully realize that they rely on each other's strengths to solve their cases: This is further demonstrated when Mulder is abducted and Scully is left ...

Last year I had my Woodlake students complete a DBQ regarding Progressivism, where they had to argue which 20th century issue they would invest their million dollars into. As always, I had students finish significantly earlier than others so I quickly threw together another project where they had to create a poster describing a current issue that they felt needed attention. This was meant to keep the early finishers occupied, but turned into a project that the students became excited about: Ebola by Mikayla Juvera New iPhone Concerns by Ramiro Padilla North Korea by Henry Pfaff Unfortunately, because of pacing and an upcoming benchmark, we couldn't invest much time into the project, but I wished that one day I could do this project on a big scale. Then a year later, my wish was granted when I was offered my dream job at Minarets High School, a school dedicated to project-based learning. I knew immediately that one of my projects would be focused on muckraking curren...

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 ...