Thoughts on teaching & educational technology

Below is pasted the information for our reunion. You can also download this pdf copy of the Reunion Flyer.

Class of 1989 Reunion
Memorial Day Weekend, May 22-24, 2009

Friday, 22 May: Informal Gathering
6pm-9pm, at Gentle Ben’s Brewing Company, 865 E. University — just west of Park on University. We’ll meet on the 2nd floor outside deck to share war stories, trade pictures of kids, and decide what else to do that night. Don’t feel that you need to stay — but show up to get reacquainted. Chris, Jeremy, and Jenny will definitely be there from 6-9 — after that it’s anyone’s guess.

Saturday, 23 May: The Big Dinner
6-10pm, at the Manning House, near Downtown, www.manninghouse.com, 450 W. Paseo Redondo, 85701.   Casual dress, cash bar from 6-7, dinner at 7, music and maybe even dancing Penguins after dinner.

Sunday, 24 May: Eegee’s in the park!
11am-?, Highland Vista (now “2030”) Park, 5300 E 7th St, buried in the neighborhood between Rosemont, Broadway, 5th, and Craycroft.

The pdf flyer has maps to the Saturday and Sunday locations. Friday’s is pretty obvious. Please contact me if you have any questions, either through this blog or Facebook.

As with all my presentations, feel free to download a PDF copy of my Collaborative Teaching with Wikis presentation, along with the information sheet for that session.

Additionally, here is a copy of my poster session presentation, about Teaching American History Thematically, along with another information sheet.

Feel free to download a PDF copy of my presentation, Cooperative Teaching: Using Technology to Bring a Department Together, as well as the one-page notes sheet I gave out at in Houston.

After having attended NCSS in San Diego and DC, and a few other social studies conferences since the fall of 2006, I can say with some perspective that NCHE is pretty good. I think there is a much greater focus on history as a unique discipline, rather than ’stuff that happened in the past’ as watered-down ’social studies.’ The sessions are better suited, on the whole, to high school teachers, and are more content-rich than activity-focused than what I’ve come to expect from NCSS. Additionally, they’re all well-attended — the vendor hall is a ghost town during all the concurrent sessions. I think that’s a testament to the seriousness of the attendees and presenters.

Additionally, the take-away materials have, in general, been of better quality and reflective of a higher level of scholarship, or at least a desire for it, than what I’ve seen at other conferences. And the lunch today was much better, too — not the typical smallish chicken breast with some herb & glaze coating.

If you’re interested in teaching history, and want to mix with people of the same ilk, and who will want to talk about history and history teaching methods with you, I think this conference, which will be held in Boston next year, would be worth your time.

jdg

Thanks for attending my session at NCHE in Louisville. Here is a PDF copy of my slides, and you can click here to get a zip file of some of the content resources I’d use to teach this unit.

Take a look around the rest of my blog — I’ve got a number of posts about instructional strategies, historical inquiry, and educational technology.

I mentioned last year that I’ve used song lyrics as springboards for student inquiry, and as a way to come at a topic, and my students, from an unexpected direction. Well, I did it again. See, there’s this great song, by a great band, and this great song tells the story of the landings in Normandy on D-Day. Some of the language is figurative; some is literal. All of it is meaningful and rooted in accurate history.

I took the song, broke it up by (mostly 4-line) stanza, and assigned each stanza to a pair or trio of students (this particular class is somewhat small, so it worked out well this way). Using the question-writing strategies I’ve been teaching and reinforcing throughout the year (start here for that) my students worked through each line of the song, creating for themselves a comprehensive list of questions to help them understand the meaning. Using some teacher-selected resources from our databases, the students began answering these questions, and writing next-level questions based on the knowledge they were building. Then I set them loose to use their web research skills to flesh out their understanding of the individual lines in their stanza, and the overall meaning of those lines when taken together.

As a product, each group had to make a case for what their lines & stanza as a whole meant, then put together a text & visual story of that case. I wish I could link the final product, assembled and posted on our class wiki, but it’s got student names — confidentiality, you know. I was very impressed with what my students created, and the entire class was able to create a detailed, accurate, and powerful telling of Operation OVERLORD.

The kids really got into it, and I played the song, Iron Maiden’s excellent ‘The Longest Day’ on the last day of the unit. It’s a very powerful song, musically and lyrically, and I think that after the intense study they did about the history it portrays, they walked away with more than just the song — it was a song that had a greater meaning to them.

Corny? Risky? Metal not appropriate in the classroom? Whatever. My students know why the invasion took place, the challenges faced by the planners and men who actually did it, what happened on that ‘longest day’ and the price those men paid to defeat Nazism. And based on similar lessons from earlier this year, they’ll remember it…it’s no longer just names & dates…it’s history with meaning.

Please find below a link to a PDF copy of my slideshow from MEC 2008, held on 11 March at Arizona State University. It was a good conference, overall, and I was happy with the turnout for my worksho, ‘Effective Classroom Uses of Web 2.0 Technology.’ As always, I’m hopeful that some of the attendees (that would be YOU!) will want to keep in contact so we can trade ideas and I can get some feedback about how others might implement what I covered today.

I always leave workshops wanting to have done more. One hour is simply not enough…nor the two hours I had at NSSSA last November…all I can do in that amount of time is introduce and make a case what I’ve been able to accomplish, which will hopefully pique the interest of others to take similar risks. There simply isn’t enough time, and the ’stand and deliver’ format required at most conferences is not conducive to real teaching and transfer of knowledge.  That’s why I hope such chance meetings with people from across the educational spectrum might generate greater contact. So email me! Or respond here.

jdg

MEC 2008 Slideshow PDF

So it’s been what, a few months since my last post? Chalk that up to having a job that I enjoy, and sinking time into it…and a family I love. And maybe it’s because blogging isn’t exactly what I thought it would be. I figured that if I created one, I’d feel compelled to post regularly, and that would help me reflect on what I was doing, get in touch with others interested in the same, and make connections I’d otherwise not. That hasn’t happened, at least not thus far.

I’ve found that reflection on lessons, methods, and my teaching in general yields much better results when I’m talking with someone else in person (like my wife, the best teacher I know), or riding my bike or running. I don’t know what it is about exercise, but it helps me focus like nothing else — possibly to help me get my mind off the huffing and puffing I’m doing. Anyway, blogging as a means of reflection has not paid off.

Blogging to make contact with others hasn’t been all that successful, either, but maybe that’s because I haven’t learned the traffic rules of the ‘blogosphere’ yet, and thus don’t know where to look, what to do and say, and with whom to make contact in order to kickstart that process. Oh well. I’ve met some very interesting people through this, but blogging has not been the rich asymmetrical discussion I’d hoped it would be.

Regardless, I’ll continue posting now and again, with timing probably reflective of bursts of ideas and/or additional free time. And there’s my rationale for being absent!

jdg

It’s been a busy month, and right now we’re on Christmas break, so I’ve not a whole lot to say, and not much motivation to come up with things, either. I do, however, need to get planning for 7 JAN, when we go back, and I’ve got some (possibly odd) ideas for how I’m going to continue my American Government courses and my (college level) American History survey course.

Until the fine ideas start to flow, have a Happy New Year.

jdg

It’s Sunday night, and I’m decompressing after 3 days at NSSSA/NCSS in San Diego. I figured I ought to put down some thoughts before I have to go back to work, forget to, then struggle in a week or so when they’ve faded a bit.

First, that convention center is huge — almost absurdly so. On Friday there was a home show, NCSS, and a World of Warcraft convention (no kidding — complete with WoW people…actually talking with each other in person!), all going on simultaneously, with no rubbing of elbows but at the many Starbuck’s locations found throughout the massive halls. So, basically, my knees and feet are sore. Is this a stupid thing to comment on? Maybe, maybe not — my feet are still tired.

As for the convention itself (the meat of this post), I was disappointed a bit on behalf of World History/Studies people — was it just me or did there seem to be a glaring lack of sessions for middle and high school teachers (especially the latter) outside of American History? Sure, I’m an American History & Government teacher, but I had the two other teachers in my department there, too, and my World History teacher was at a loss for good sessions in her area. I only have last year’s NCSS in Washington DC to compare against, but it seemed that if ‘Crossing Borders, Building Bridges’ was the theme of this year’s convention, it came up a bit short on non-US offerings. Maybe that’s just my perception, but I paged through the program a number of times, and kept coming away with the same reaction.

As for the quality of the sessions themselves, some that I attended were good; some not so much — but that’s such a function of personal preference, teaching style, and prior subject knowledge that it may not even be worth mentioning. I sat through an interesting presentation on using economic reasoning to analyze the causes for the American War for Independence, and since I teach American History thematically it tied in nicely with what I’m doing already, and I walked away with some new perspectives.

The vendor floor was….well, it was the vendor floor. The textbook manufacturers had their massive, showy pavilions, which I avoided; there were some nice maps on display; I made off with two 4 foot by 5 foot posters of the US Constitution (and actually found a tube to get them home in!); and I got to speak a little Korean. It was nice to talk with other teachers as they wandered around, too — that’s probably what I like most about conventions like this: the contact with other educators.

I had a great conversation with a gentleman from Baltimore in the San Diego airport this morning — I am pretty sure his name was Joe (Joe: if you’re reading this and I’m wrong on your name I APOLOGIZE!!…too many names for one weekend…I need a camera phone to make trading cards). Anyway, he is in a curriculum/admin-type position, overseeing Social Studies throughout a district, and he and I talked at length about the breakdown that occurs when new technology is implemented without new teaching methods. I’d really like to continue that discussion with him, and anyone else who’d like to weigh in — it’s a huge issue, and one that I believe could hobble edtech initiatives and could really get in the way of substantive change in methods and results.

Weigh in with what you’d like, and check out the PDF versions of my two slideshows.

jdg