September 8, 2011 in TeacherThink
How are your students reflecting on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11? Mine will be watching and reflecting in the following order:
[1] Watch how normal this day started on the Today Show:
[2] Watch a montage of actual footage of the attacks:
[3] Listen to Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You?”
[4] Tweet: #WhereWereYou?
[5] Watch several animated 9/11 stories [all true] from StoryCorps:
What have you found? Share your ideas here.
August 3, 2011 in TeacherThink, TechThink
One of my favorite aspects of modern history is teaching propaganda of all sorts: posters, speech, video, etc. When I ran across these social media propaganda posters, it sparked the idea that given a medium and a topic, one get not only creative but deep with propaganda posters. Check them out. How can you incorporate this idea into your classroom?
Supposedly these can be purchased on the creator’s Etsy site JustOneScarf. Thanks to Design Milk for the lead.
July 31, 2011 in MathThink, TeacherThink
Every spring and fall, SAS [School of Arts and Sciences @ the University of Pennsylvania] faculty take a minute out on Locust Walk to share their perspectives on topics ranging from human history and the knowable universe, to fractions and fly-fishing.
A couple of my favorite “60 Second Lectures” are: “Why is Mathematics Useful?“ and “A Constitutional Moment: Freedom of Religion in One Minute.”
Classroom Connection: I love this idea for the classroom. Students choose or are assigned topics and must give a 60 Second Lecture. Obviously a rubric would have to be developed in order to evaluate it, but talk about a great way to teach efficiency in getting a point across. I have also used ”Elevator Pitches” in the classroom before. This means: you only get my attention until I get to my destination, so it better be good.
July 14, 2011 in TeacherThink
When tooling around Google+ last week I noticed an interesting post from Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He challenged his readers to guess the location of a cropped picture [see image below]:
He then revealed the location after receiving some 250+ responses. It was:
Classroom Connection: I did a little thinking about possible historical perspective activities that could go along with a challenge like this. I will take pictures, crop them, post them to my classroom [either live or online] and have some “bellringer challenges” to get their brains going. This could be a great review activity before a test too! Because I got the idea from Serey Brin, we will call it the “Brin Crop Challenge.”
Try your luck at this easy one:
Click here for the answer.
June 18, 2011 in GoPoThink, MathThink, TeacherThink, TechThink
One of the beautiful things about education is learning from one year and starting fresh with another. I believe that good teachers are always tweaking their lessons using both quantitative data and qualitative findings gut feelings from past the past year. I have done this with my grand Twitter experiment. After tweeting in the classroom for one year, I am happy to report that it was a success. Students learned to express their thoughts and/or learning in 140 characters or less, and I was able to gauge their learning on a daily basis. They got really good at tweeting by the end of the year, which allowed them to be more creative with their mentions [@ mentions] and hashtags [#].
What I liked:
Lessons learned: This year my students probably tweeted about 3x/week. I am ok that rate; however, I wanted to devise a better plan for keeping record of all tweets throughout the year. So, I created a Tweet Log [check it out below]. It is bound [using staples thanks to budget cuts] and will be collected/checked periodically but kept all year long. I also learned that student tweets are generally only as good as the clarity of the hashtag [#]. I provide a hashtag topic to prompt students, and the quality of the hashtag sets the tone for the 3 1/2 minute tweet session. I plan on keeping a running list [table of contents, if you will] of tweets throughout the year. Also, I plan on publishing the “Tweets of the Day” here on TeacherThink.
Click Naslund Tweet Log Final to access my new Tweet Log.
Click here to download the “Twitter Font”
How do you use Twitter in the classroom? Do you have suggestions for mine?
