World History
In ten years of being a chair, tomorrow will be the second day I have missed a county wide meeting (so I can work with my AP Comp kids to better prepare for the AP exam). I was going to present on how to teach students on a snow day. But using my favorite technique, I can flip the presentation using the video above. The video explains how you can use Blackboard Collaborate which is something we have in Fairfax County. But there are other alternatives as you can see below.
- Flipping And Grouping To A Better Learning Environment
Two days ago my county's deputy superintendent spent part of a period with one of my classes. He was curious how we were doing with our Chromebooks. One of my students said something like she really liked the class because "We live in...
- Personalized Urls
We normally start my classes with a five question quiz where my students can use their notes from their flipped video to answer the questions. It serves a few purposes. First I won't count the quiz grade if the notes aren't good enough...
- Changing The Face Of Instruction
I am a member of several Facebook teacher sites and am in the midst of adding to one where a teacher said his administration has banned front of the room teaching. A number of the teachers are saying how awful that is. Truth be known I have...
- School On A Snow Day
I will admit that I can't get away with this with all of my classes, but my AP Comparative (which is AP US Government and AP Comparative in one year) is a motivated bunch. So while today is our second snow day (actually a "cold day" since it is 5...
- Big Blue Button And Teaching/meeting Online
My county uses Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) for our online classes (and will soon be letting teachers use it for their own purposes). But you can use Big Blue Button for free to teach your students (as I tell my students it could...
World History
Snow Day Reprise
In ten years of being a chair, tomorrow will be the second day I have missed a county wide meeting (so I can work with my AP Comp kids to better prepare for the AP exam). I was going to present on how to teach students on a snow day. But using my favorite technique, I can flip the presentation using the video above. The video explains how you can use Blackboard Collaborate which is something we have in Fairfax County. But there are other alternatives as you can see below.
- You could Google Plus Hangout live stream where you could send a link to your students and they could watch a live lecture (here's how). You could then use Today's Meet to send a link to students and you could see their live questions. You would be able to do this by splitting your screen.
- If the day is cancelled tomorrow we will spend much of the period answering questions on review problem sets and then I will assign a few more so that we can have our quiz on Wed and our test on Friday without missing a beat.
- But you don't always have to meet your students. For example last year I decided not to have an online session and instead made the video above as both an introduction and a continuation of our material. Then my government kids watched this video to look up these court cases.
- I communicate with the kids by using Remind, Blackboard and even using my grade book which has all of the kids' emails. For the Remind message I used a shortened tinyurl (tinyurl.com/fcpscoldday) which linked to my normal homework e-sheet. so I didn't have to text the kids multiple times with the assignments.
- So if you have a motivated bunch and you can't afford to miss a day of school you might want to try some of the techniques.
The bottom line is that we had 12 snow days in my county and a number more late starts and my kids still got in all their work and are where we should have been should we not have missed school.
I should point out that this is one of the many techniques I go over in my book Deeper Learning Through Technology: Using the Cloud To Individualize Instruction.
I should point out that this is one of the many techniques I go over in my book Deeper Learning Through Technology: Using the Cloud To Individualize Instruction.
- Flipping And Grouping To A Better Learning Environment
Two days ago my county's deputy superintendent spent part of a period with one of my classes. He was curious how we were doing with our Chromebooks. One of my students said something like she really liked the class because "We live in...
- Personalized Urls
We normally start my classes with a five question quiz where my students can use their notes from their flipped video to answer the questions. It serves a few purposes. First I won't count the quiz grade if the notes aren't good enough...
- Changing The Face Of Instruction
I am a member of several Facebook teacher sites and am in the midst of adding to one where a teacher said his administration has banned front of the room teaching. A number of the teachers are saying how awful that is. Truth be known I have...
- School On A Snow Day
I will admit that I can't get away with this with all of my classes, but my AP Comparative (which is AP US Government and AP Comparative in one year) is a motivated bunch. So while today is our second snow day (actually a "cold day" since it is 5...
- Big Blue Button And Teaching/meeting Online
My county uses Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) for our online classes (and will soon be letting teachers use it for their own purposes). But you can use Big Blue Button for free to teach your students (as I tell my students it could...