World History
One of the most frustrating exercises I have had as a teacher has been to get my non AP students to write essays. First off, I have to hear the line, "This isn't an English class." Secondly so many students simply do not write their essays, instead choosing to take the grade hit. Well I believe I finally have found a successful way to get the kids to write essays.
The upshot is that almost all of my students wrote their essays and wrote a substantial number of points.
- Google Bans Essay Writing Adverts
Sean Coughlan at the BBC has this report titled Google bans essay writing adverts. Google has finally decided to not allow online essay writing companies to advertise in the Google Adwords program. Coughlan wrote, "Google is to ban adverts for essay writing...
- 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...
- Faketweting
One of the things I teach my teacher students is how to have their students create fake Tweet streams. You can use it to have conversations between historical figures, add in pictures and generally make your students condense their comments to...
- Comments In Google Docs
Almost all of my AP students now submit their essays to me via Googel Docs. I love it because since they now are using the platform for a number of their assignments in school, they look to see when I have graded the assignment (which is easy since...
- Rubric Maker
When I first became a teacher one of the hardest things I found was how to grade essays and presentations. Well if you go here, all you need to do is fill in a few parameters and gives you a rubric for literally anything you need (essays, debate,...
World History
Getting More Out of an Essay
- Help the students find background information by setting up categories for the students or even asking questions about documents if you are doing a DBQ.
- Put students in groups and use Google Drive to share their background notes
- Go over the fundamentals of writing and then have students write lots of the essay in class and share parts of it with the students
- E-mail parents that the essays are due and use Remind101 to tell remind students that it is due. I even, this time, had students share the essays with partners so they could give feedback.
- I made the essays due by 6 pm Sunday night and then put comments (note, no grade) all over everyone's essays. When the students got to class I actually gave them a quiz on the main points of an essay (see #3) and then let the students look at my comments and then ask questions about it.
- Let my many ESOL students write their essay in their native language and then translate using Google Translate.
- Then I told the kids they can fix my comments and share them with me using Google Drive by Wednesday.
The upshot is that almost all of my students wrote their essays and wrote a substantial number of points.
- Google Bans Essay Writing Adverts
Sean Coughlan at the BBC has this report titled Google bans essay writing adverts. Google has finally decided to not allow online essay writing companies to advertise in the Google Adwords program. Coughlan wrote, "Google is to ban adverts for essay writing...
- 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...
- Faketweting
One of the things I teach my teacher students is how to have their students create fake Tweet streams. You can use it to have conversations between historical figures, add in pictures and generally make your students condense their comments to...
- Comments In Google Docs
Almost all of my AP students now submit their essays to me via Googel Docs. I love it because since they now are using the platform for a number of their assignments in school, they look to see when I have graded the assignment (which is easy since...
- Rubric Maker
When I first became a teacher one of the hardest things I found was how to grade essays and presentations. Well if you go here, all you need to do is fill in a few parameters and gives you a rubric for literally anything you need (essays, debate,...