Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

I believe it was the summer after my first year of teaching that I first heard about the ISTE Conference, a mega conference that attracted the elite of the edtech world. Each year, I followed people's experiences at ISTE and each year I cursed myself for not attending. It soon became one of those "I'm going to do that eventually.." goals that could easily be put off year after year. So this year I made the executive decision that I would attend. Best.  Decision.  Ever.  Its only the second day of the conference, but I can confidently say that #ISTE16 was one of my best decisions. For starters, I'm killing it with Step Challenge; the day isn't even over and I'm already over 10,000 steps. Yes, I know VivoFit. I need to move, but I'm trying to blog right now. I'm also connecting with SO many of the people I have followed on twitter for the last three years as well as meeting SO many new people with awesomely creative ideas! (...

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...

As I said in my earlier post , revision is a necessary part of project-based learning. In fact, its even embedded into the Minarets Cs, the skills and goals we that emphasize for our students at Minarets: This is why I continued improving the ways my students revised their work even after I found success with Student Completion in Schoology . Since I had students participating more readily in the scaffold project process, I found another weakness in my process: Peer Reviews. I love peer reviews because it allows students an opportunity to get feedback from their peers in order to help them improve the quality of their project. It also gives them the opportunity to dissect the rubric and gain a better understanding of what the final expectations are.  At the start of the year, students filled out a Google Form that was based around the rubric for the project. There would be spots for comments, but students wouldn't always get to see the feedback. I wouldn't ...

After using project-based learning for a full school year, I have found that getting students to critique and revise their projects is a struggle. We all know that it is an essential part of any process that involves a final product, but some of my students do not seem to see the benefit of revising their work before submitting it, which means that I end up with projects that seem more like a rough draft than a final draft. Of course this is not just a weird quirk about Minarets; I experience it at my old school site and my fellow teachers at a variety of levels and schools also experience this frustration. At the start of the year, I knew that I needed to make revision part of the PBL process in my classroom. I decided to do this in two ways: Scaffold Process : Rather than assigning a giant project that was due in two weeks and saying ' Well, good luck! ',  I have students complete their projects in steps. For example, they  turn in a topic proposal then a research...

I think it was almost three years that I discovered that you could become a Google Certified Teacher, an educator that got prestigious training at Google Headquarters and got to collaborate with some of the most innovator educators in the world. Even though I was still in my first year of teaching and was just learning the potential that Google and edtech had in my classroom, I knew that one day I wanted to become a Google Certified Teacher. Flash forward to January 2016: Google had revamped its Training Center and "Google Certified Teachers" were now Google Certified Innovators. I was eagerly awaiting my email from Google about whether I had been accepted into #MTV16, the first cohort for the new program to meet in Mountain View. Even though I knew that getting accepted into the prestigious Google program typically required multiple applications, I still hoped that maybe I would somehow get in on the first try. When it came to the application, I had trouble coming up wit...

Warfare is always a favorite topic for my students. Maybe its the excitement from the action or the emotional response that is brought on by the death involved, but student engagement always improves dramatically as soon as we start discussing a war, especially WWI. This year I had the opportunity to push student engagement even more by mixing the War to End All Wars and project-based learning. When I was in college,  I always wanted to take the History of Warfare, where we would have studied how warfare evolved. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to take the class I used it and the fact that WWI resulted in dramatic changes in how wars are fought as inspirations for my students' WWI projects. I introduced this unit by having students analyze primary resources to determine the causes of WWI, beyond the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Once the causes were determined and the trenches were experienced by the students , they began work on their Evolution of Warfare pre...

Twitter is by far my favorite social media app. It has opened up so many opportunities for me and has given me so many amazing connections with educators all over the world. I've always wanted to integrate into my classroom for student use, but, due to my former school's policies, I could not. With my employment at Minarets, I was finally given the opportunity to do it, but -- I'm embarrassed to admit -- it took me nine months to finally get my students to use Twitter. As always, the possibility of failure made me hesitant to even try implementing Twitter into my classroom. I came up with so many excuses and reasons for why I couldn't do it: I'm still adjusting to Minarets and I don't have time to focus on Twitter on top of everything else. Well the students are blogging so that will get them connected to other people. I don't want to expose students to another way to bully or harass each other. I like my job too much to risk it for Twitter assignments. ...