Civil Rights Project Reflection by Billy B

The topic I researched was the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. This church was
located in Birmingham Alabama, and was a very important civil rights meeting location. The church was bombed by the KKK, and 4 girls were killed during the bombing. This bombing affected many, and in the aftermath, many people were upset. I learned how important this church was, and how many people were affected by it. I was able to learn how important the civil rights movement was, and how many people did not like the idea. In the end, I learned how everything needed to line up to make everything work. I enjoyed being able to pick our topics and do our own research. I liked how, instead of a presentation, we had to make a video that we didn’t have to present to the class. And lastly, I enjoyed how easy the project material was to understand. Changes I would make in the future to this project would be to lower the amount of work that this project needs. This project was stretched to almost 3 weeks while it could have been done in 1. I feel that the exit questions with this project were not helpful, and just added workload to it. If I were to change anything, it would be to remove the exit questions.

Welcome to the 2023 2024 School Year

So, we are into August and school starts in a couple of weeks.  I wanted to get ahead of the game so to speak and introduce my Honors Students to their blog site.  You will be posting many of your writing assignments to your individual class blogs.

Remember, there is no mandatory minimum number of words, sentences, or paragraphs, just answer the prompts given and include information from the lesson to defend your answer.  Never be afraid to ask for guidance, I will ASSIST with, but not grade your blog posts if asked.

You are encouraged to personalize your blogs, but please keep them school appropriate and do not share items like last names, addresses, and other personal information that can be risky.

People will read these posts, so take pride in your work and show off your thoughts and words!

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.