Category: Fall-17

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Class 3: Teacher as Curator

Teacher as curator

Skillful curation is based on skills across Bloom’s Taxonomy – a good grounding in lower order understanding of content, analysis of theme, evaluation of appropriate content and assemblage into a new context (or exhibition). This class will explore how history teachers can be skillful curators – designing engaging experiences where their students can “be the historian.”

This class will open with a lecture / activity that explores three elements of curation: Teacher as curator handout  1MB pdf

  • Select the artifacts
  • Think like a historian
  • Scaffold the content
Assignment 3

See completed student assignments 3 here

Students will curate a small exhibit of at least 3 artifacts. There should be a clearly stated theme and artifact labels and / or explanatory text as needed. Choose to do an exhibit based on any historical theme that interests you. Historical artifacts could include images, audio or video – but all should be in the public domain.

…. Or get creative and choose a theme based on artifacts in your possession – for example how would future museum goers understand three objects from your Star Wars collection or cooking utensils? (if you choose this approach, take photos of the objects you have.)

Please complete your post by Sat 16. All students should look at the other exhibits and leave a comment on at least one. Did you “get” what they were trying to say? Suggestions?

All students should use AdobeSpark to create featured image. It’s a very useful tool for creating striking title slides with public domain content.  ( I use them for most of my featured images in this blog). I’ll explain how to use in class.

Image credit: Adobe Spark

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Class 2: Three Keys to Student Engagement

Three keys to student engagement

Today’s class will focus on the subject of student engagement. We’ll use a presentation and a few activities to demonstrate how higher order thinking tasks, opportunities for student choice and fostering student reflection can both enhance student engagement and create deeper learning.  Three Keys handout 1.5MB pdf

We will also log into new WordPress accounts and give students the chance to introduce themselves in a visual essay in response to a poem.

Assignment 2

See completed student assignment 2 here

Here’s your chance to demonstrate the role of thinking task, choice and reflection. Read Where I’m From, below and create a blog post that uses words and images to describe “where you’re from.” Don’t feel you have to take the prompt literally – what other descriptors tell us about your roots?

“Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon

I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush
the Dutch elm
whose long-gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I’m from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I’m from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from Perk up! and Pipe down!
I’m from He restoreth my soul
with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.

I’m from Artemus and Billie’s Branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger,
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.

Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments–
snapped before I budded —
leaf-fall from the family tree.

Header image credit Adobe Spark

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Class 1: Teachers and Students

Changing roles students and teachers

This is our first class of the fall ’17 term. We’re going to use a number of activities to get to know one another. Our focus will be exploring the changing roles of student and teacher. As a subtext, we will use some “old school” and cutting edge tools.

pappas-rookieI’ll share a copy of my 1971 student teaching evaluation (2 page pdf) Quite a relic – Why did I save it?  We’ll examine it as an historic document with a critical eye for answering a number of questions: Who created it and why? Historic context? Point-of-view? What could we learn from it? What other sources might we need to collaborate?

We will explore what it tells us about NYS teacher preparation programs in 1971.

We’ll read and discuss – Snapshot of a Modern Learner by Mike Fisher. We are going to use Prism – a tool for “crowdsourcing interpretation” to collaboratively mark up the reading. Here’s a link to that Prism markup tool. Below – some instructions for using Prism.

Assignment 1
We’ll explore FlipGrid – “a video discussion community for your classroom” and I will email you a link to our first video discussion. I’ve posed a very simple task: “in 90 seconds describe yourself as a learner. Don’t use pedagogical terms. Keep it real.”
This will be our chance to try out FlipGrid and discuss how we might use it during the course to support each other with our lesson designs.

Header image credit Adobe Spark