World War II Project Reflections

Well, we started a flash project several weeks ago, my honors students chose topics from World War II to research and present to their classmates.  My goal was to take just a couple of days to do some quick research and explain it to the class.  We could then move on and forward in time, hopefully making a leap as if using a Tardis or a wormhole.

Well, things did not go quite as planned and we had to make a number of adjustments.  That being said, those adjustments led to a variety of learning experiences for both my students and myself.  To make a long story short,  the project took quite a bit longer that projected.  Some of the issues were out of our control, such as my classroom laptop not quite dying, but let’s say performing at a pace of a snail covered in molasses and pine tar, heading uphill, over sharp glass, on a cold winter’s day…dragging about 400 pounds of weight, and an open parachute into the wind.  Yet this only affected the project at the end, when my students were about to present their work to their classmates.

The project research and and presentation build was done in the computer lab; my new class set of iPads have a glitch, if students log in to Edmodo using a Google account, they can never be truly signed out.  This is a bit problematic since the iPads are shared across six classes.

Anyway, the project build took a bit longer than expected, though research was quick.  Since this was the first project build in class I wanted to make sure students were comfortable with the process.  Most groups used either Prezi or Google Slides as their presentation medium, a select few ventured out into podcasts, Google MyMaps,  and other formats.  Of the Prezi and Google Slide crew I managed to convince a few groups to turn their presentations into screencasts using Touchcast and the class Padcaster.  This process worked well overall and the extra time used for this project can be made up during the next project.

Some of the learning process for myself caught me by surprise.  Not normally known for my patience outside of the classroom, I believed that I have used technology long enough that I was beyond frustration when it glitched, broke, or bogged down in the classroom.  Well…I was greatly mistaken.  I have to give MAJOR PROPS, to one of my students whose presentation was delayed several times because of the computer problems.  He took the situation in stride, did not become frustrated and presented like a pro.  I on the other hand became rattled and not so calm with the device in question.

Looking back at the issue, I believe my frustration arose because the problems directly affected the students, and no I am not saying this to look good.  If a glitch affects me in the classroom, I have many ways to adapt and overcome the issue.  I have been in the classroom for many years, there are many tricks up my sleeve to work around problems.  This problem hit the students directly, they could not complete their presentations, thus lose out on a big chunk of their grade. I still do not know if it was stubbornness, myopia, or my minor OCD issues that prevented me from just trading rooms with a colleague to have the students present while the computer was down.  For whatever the reason, I turned down a couple of offers and took a delay of a couple of days with presentations, students used the time to review vocabulary, review their presentations, and other such coursework.

Overall, I was pleased with the students’ projects and their effort in creating them.   I am also very pleased with out technology department, they helped fix the computer issue and kept at it when the problem persisted for some unknown reason.  The major issue I had with the project, outside of the time issue I discussed earlier is the large group of projects that were similar in format.  I can change that rather easily moving forward, as the classroom teacher I have full control over that segment and it is an easy fix.  i will discuss that shortly.

Moving forward there are some changes I will implement.  For one, the time frame of the project and amount of class time will be scaled back.  Since students have worked through the process with “training wheels” we can take them off and speed up the process.  Also more work can be done on their own next time.  In conjunction with those changes.  My classroom door is always open for students who need help or a place to work, so scaling back class time can be made up before or after school and during study halls.

To address the homogeneity of the projects, here are several adaptations I have planned.  I will institute a “Project Passport” where students cannot complete the same style of project until after they have completed a number of other project styles.  This will expand their repertoire of knowledge, keep the class interesting, and continue to challenge all of us to expand our horizons.  A limit on the number of similar styles of projects will be put in place, in a first come first served basis.  This along with the passports will force the students to expand their horizons when it comes to projects.

The largest influence to the project homogeneity issue will come from my own personal changes.  I need to expand how I present information to the classes, by adding to my own skill set, I can introduce and model the various projects to my classes.  The additional styles should alleviate some fears on their part of the unknown and may even intrigue or pique their interest outright to expand horizons.

I plan to continue to update this blog and my other blog throughout the year, please check back to see how my efforts are progressing.

You can find the student projects posted on the class wiki by clicking here.

Sample Blog Post for Honors US II 2018

All blog posts need to contain certain information along with your post.  First, you need a “Title.” It may be creative, but it should have some indication of or relation to your topic.  You also need the main body of your post, this is obvious, but I mention it anyway. You must include “Tags” in your post, these are bits of information that help people find your post when searching on the Internet.  The more “Tags” you have the better the chance of people searching and finding your post. You should also place your post in a “Category” which is sort of like placing your post in a file cabinet drawer to help see the organization of your thoughts and ideas.

Some miscellaneous items, make sure you publish your post, especially if you are working on a mobile device.  Saving a post as a draft on a mobile device saves it only to that device, not to the Internet, whereas saving a post as a draft on a computer saves it to the Internet.  If you are not completed with your post just add “This Post is Currently Under Construction” so anyone who comes across your blog knows you are not finished. Please make sure you make YOUR BLOG the default blog to write to and not the class blog.  More information will be posted later.

New Wiki

Morning signCreative Commons License Artur Rydzewski via Compfight

Sunrise or Sunset?  Glass Half Empty or Half Full?  Same information, yet different opinions as to what is going on.

In February I found out that Wikispaces was shutting down for good this year.  As a free user, I had until the end of May to migrate many years, over 10, of student information to a new Internet space.  If I did nothing, all of that information would disappear forever.  Student projects would disappear, student notes and resources would be be gone, years of work from many people would just evaporate into nothing.

At first I was devastated, Wikispaces was my first online presence and online class workspace.  From a nostalgic perspective I was losing a part of my history, from a practical standpoint I was losing a major tool out of my repertoire with days if not months of work ahead to try and salvage as much information as I possibly could.

As time has passed, I realized that this entire situation can be considered a new beginning with the potential to really expand my knowledge base.  This brings about short and long term goals that I must meet or lose a lot of information and history.

In the short term, I re-examined PBwiki, I remembered this sight from my first experience building an online presence.  This site was passed over for Wikispaces when I  first started this journey, oh the irony…right?  Well, I jumped back into it and started building  a new site, combining my student note wiki with my student project wiki.  PBwiki limits the number of sites one can use per email address, so combining the two was a necessity.

The wiki I used for my professional development presentations and educational resources can be found here, at least until the end of May.  It is being migrated to a separate PBwiki. I kept this as a separate wiki because I do not know how the storage limits will affect my information yet.

The long play is that I am playing around with Weebly and Google Sites as possible support or complimentary resources for my work.  There is always the possibility to expand my main web presence, mrsalvucci.com into a larger project.  For now these are just thoughts, with the main work focusing on saving the past and migrating a plethora of information to PBwiki.

 

Parent Participation with Student Blogs

Journal arbyreed via Compfight

Hello everyone, I hope all is well this wintery flu season.  I sent out the Cel.ly to direct you to this site and hopefully show off the students’ blogs.  The students are doing all sorts of great work and publishing their projects to the Internet.  I wanted you to see their work and I am not sure they have showed you their blogs as of yet.  I know I am risking their wrath for encouraging you to do this, but so be it…they deserve to have people view their work and see the effort they put forth.  We will be doing more writing on these blogs as the year goes on, please stop back after today and check out their continued endeavors.

Feel free check out their blogs by clicking on the link to the left labeled Individual Student Blogs 20017 2018 by clicking here.  Once you are on the page, click on one of the images based upon your student’s class period and scroll through the list of blogs.

Please read their work and feel free to leave a comment.  All comments need to be approved before they become publicly viewable, I am not worried about parents replying to blogs, but you never know who may stumble across them on the Internet, so we have to approve all comments.

You can also check out their other projects which are located on the Student Project Wiki.  Click on the “Definitive Destination Guide” and peruse the work of New Brighton High School’s students.  Publishing their work to the Internet is great, but it is even greater when you check it out.

Enrichment Opportunities 2017 2018 School Year

Students have been asking “Can I do extra credit?”  My response is always, “There are plenty of enrichment assignments you can attempt for enrichment points.”  What’s the difference?  Extra Credit is usually points just added on top of a students grade for whatever reason.  Enrichment Points are points added to a grade for completing an extra assignment, but they are averaged in as an extra test, quiz, or project, not just added on top of the existing grade.  They definitely help out, but not as much as just piling on points to the existing grade.

So what sort of projects to we have for enrichment?  I will keep the complete list on my website, mrsalvucci.com, they will be posted as their own page: Enrichment Assignments.  But for now, here is a quick list of projects students can explore for enrichment:

  • Working in some way shape or form on the class Internet Talk Show, “Wake Up New Brighton”
    • We can use people on camera and behind the scenes to help showcase events and cool things about our school and community.
  • Creating a StoryCorps project about someone or something in the community.
  • Using the Livescribe Pen to take notes or create a pencast for your classmates.
  • Creating a review podcast to help your classmates with course materials.
  • Guest blogging on the class blog about a course of study topic or something you find interesting within the school or community at large.
  • Updating the class wiki to assist classmates with course information and notes.

The goal is to get students PUBLISHING and CONTRIBUTING to the Internet.  I hope to get them to become creators of positive and appropriate information and media.  To be aware of appropriate behaviors online in educational and general settings; where these habits can carry over into everyday social media experiences.  The students should have a positive digital footprint, one that they and their families can be proud of and use as a reference throughout their educational and professional careers.  The enrichment activities listed here are an attempt to move the students closer to those goals.

If you have any questions about this post or the enrichment activities, please feel free to contact me at my school email.

Deceleration of Independents

In the Decleration of Independents there are key arguments about the speration of Great Britian and of the colonies. There are key arguments like the king did not allow the Governers to pass laws which are nessececray for society to keep peace and make rules to follow. The king did not allow trade with other country’s which would cause them to no longer make any money from goods to sell and to buy any goods that would come from other countrys, the king also took away some of the colonys most important laws.

Because the king told the governers to not pass laws that would help the early America, they had to make and pass laws that would benefit the king and only the king.

The king cut off trade with the colonies so that they would not be able to make and money from goods that they would trade with other country’s and would not be able to buy anything from other country’s that helps benefit daily life.

The king also took away some of the most important laws that help form the rules of daily life and that caused many people to get even more frustrated with the king.

These are some of the many key arguments that Thomas Jefferson made for the separation of the colonies and the king.

Fiscal Crisis

A fiscal crisis is also known as a budget crisis. In my opinion, this is pretty stupid. This means that there is no budget that anyone can agree on. So, what there won’t be money for the states? I believe, that the prior presidents and senates are to blame for the fiscal crisis. The republicans are back in control and Obama is massively over spending. Canter promised to “play hard ball” with the White House and Obama. They are trying to prepare the republicans for the ways of Washington. They are trying to get tax, medicare, and health insurance lowered. If spending does not get cut, the republicans will push the issue. The republicans feel it can trigger a depression. Canter’s threat was pretty serious. The markets reacted horribly, it was almost like they didn’t react at all. All the talks were kept secret. President and speaker tried to work things out, but they could not find something to agree on. The debts just keep on rising.

Telecommunting

Yes, I would consider being a telecommuter if it was offered in my career choice. I would make this decision because, it would save me money. Instead of eating out everyday, I could bring my own lunch. I wouldn’t have as far of a drive, which would save me money on gas. Which is an option, considering how high gas prices are. Also, another benefit to telecommuting is that I get weekends and holidays off. Therefore, telecommuting will save me both time and money.

Stock Market Game Post 1

The stocks that I bought are, Buffalo Wild Wings, Fed Ex, Priceline, and Apple. I bought them because they are big profit companies and make money. At first, I wasn’t making any money, I was in the negatives for a while, now I’m in the positives, gaining money!

I plan on using my phone and iPad to to play this game.

At first my thoughts about this game were that it is really dumb because, I didn’t understand it and thought it was pointless. Now, its beginning to make a little more sense to me. I’m beginning to understand the concept of this. I think the concept of this game is to, learn that you may or may not make money on everything you buy or sell.