I need to remember to create a visual portfolio of any work I do while student teaching. It’s easy to stand out if you show the impressive student projects that are made.

If there’s one thing grinding my gears right now it’s the risk of net neutrality going away.

In my NYCIST group today Bernie McCormic, Director of Technology
at Mary McDowell Friends School in BK, posted about resources he’s used to teach his students about Net Neutrality. This is an excellent current issue to bring up in a tech classroom, especially for older middle school and high school students.

Here is what Bernie is doing at his school. (Quoted verbatim from the NYCIST email group.)

“I pushed into a couple current events classes to talk, and gave a timeline, followed by the recent shenanigans, explained a little bit about the crony capitalism, and the importance of activism over the next two months. What was uplifting was seeing the kids’ reactions. What was terrifying was just how little most of the faculty understood the central issue, much less the ramifications.

The main resources I used were:
http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/detail/net-neutrality
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/net-neutralitys-little-known-hero-antonin-scalia/361315/
http://brianwill.net/blog/2006/10/21/net-neutrality-the-electricity-analogy/
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/r/m/rmf5/What%20Is%20Network%20Neutrality.doc.

And the actual bill:
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014/db0515/FCC-14-61A1.pdf “

Nice video on overcoming obstacles 

On Friday the 8th grade had a visitor from Facing History and Ourselves. The 8th grade is reading “Night” by Elie Wiesel and learning about the Holocaust. A common thought we have when we learn about the Holocaust is “Why did the German people allow these terrible atrocities to happen?”

This lesson takes a look at what obedience means and why people are obedient. It uses a study conducted at Yale in the 1960’s by Stanley Milgram. Volunteers came in and were paid $4 to participate in the study. They were “teachers” and they had to conduct a multiple choice quiz with a “student” that they couldn’t see. If the student got the question wrong the teacher was required to give the student a shock voltage that started at 15 volts and steadily increased with each wrong answer to over 400 volts. The voltages were fake and the “student” was actually just a voice recording done by an actor. But the teacher did not know this, and it seemed like they were severely hurting the individual with each increased shock voltage.

Over 65% of the teachers (volunteers for the study) complied with the study and went up to the highest voltage on the student. This was much higher than most people would assume. So this is a great thing to consider when we think about what may have happened with the Germans during WWII.

You can find the entire lesson plan on obedience here.

One question I am left with- I would love to interview the people after they finished the experiment to see why they decided to stop or finish the procedure. What was their thought process that led them to think it was ok to go to the highest voltage?

Facing History has a lot of great curriculum and resources for Social Studies classrooms. Be sure to take a look.

Our lower school technology integrator uses Microworlds (an oldie, but still good) with the 3rd grade.

At the beginning of the year she had them create paper turtles out of index cards. On the back of the turtles the students drew a compass to help them with their positioning. There is also a cheat sheet with some of the instructions you type in to get the turtle to move. Like ‘pe’ = pen erase.

The front of the card has a turtle illustration and movement directions to help the student remember forward ‘fd’,  backward ‘bk’, left and right.

She saves the turtles in an envelope on her desk and takes them out when it looks like the students could use them.

Nice trick!

After skimming the NYCIST forums this morning I saw a blog post by Karen Blumberg, Technology Integrator at The School at Columbia University, discussing the responsible use policy (RUP) that 6th-8th grade students must sign and return at the beginning of the year before they start using school laptops.

“I always reinforce that everything they put online is public, permanent, and traceable. Plus, I remind not to imagine they have privacy online. Rather than public versus private, I say public versus less-public.
I also implore the middle schoolers to locate at least one person, preferably a grown-up and possibly me, who they can approach if they feel unsafe or uncomfortable as a result of someone else’s behavior (be it physical or virtual).”

Read the full post here.

What would you include if you were creating your own responsible use policy for a school?

Teaching students about sourcing a document is an explicit strategy instruction (Nokes & Dole, 2004.) It helps students understand what to keep in mind when they analyze a resource, specifically historical documents.

When students are sourcing a document they ask themselves these questions:

• Who wrote this?
• What is the author’s point of view?
• What was this written?
• What time frame was it written? (How long after the event?)
• Is this source believable? Why or why not?

See sourcing in action in the video below.

Small groups of students work collaboratively on an experiment or problem and write their results using dry-erase markers on a whiteboard. (Small transportable whiteboards work best.) Students should use a variety of alternative representations, especially drawings and graphs. The white boards and results are shared with all the groups at a “board meeting”. All groups can see the other boards and the students in each group take turns explaining their work to other groups. Whiteboarding was originally developed as an integral component of Modeling Instruction but can be used in any classroom and has been shown to be very effective in getting students actively engaged.