Review & Evaluate a Spreadsheet Integration project

1. Give a brief description of the project. The project I looked at was the Civil War newspaper that was done by two classes in the same school just on different floors. One class gave the North position and opinions at the end of the Civil War while the other class presented the Southern side. The students were split up into groups and worked together as well as on line through e-mail to get the information and in put needed to complete their work. The classes had spy's to report about what the other side was up to on and off during the project. In the end, the students all received a hard copy of the paper.


2. How would you adapt it for your grade level and/or discipline area? In other words, how would you change the lesson to fit your students’ needs? I wouldn't have to change the lesson at all to fit in with the age group and topic I hope to teach. I think it would be a lot of fun to work with a group from the South or from another country to see what their opinion of the times are compared to that of my students here in Idaho. How fun/hard would it be to work with a southern class and have them represent the North and we do the South and then in the end see if the classes feel like the other group "got it right" on how the other side felt.

Regardless, I think the teachers put a lot of work into the project and that it would be something I would do.

Mrs. Shinaver’s 8th grade Classroom Netiquette Rules
 Make sure everyone understands you.
 If you want to use T9, IM, acronyms, or emoticons post the meanings on your blog.
 Use your best spelling and grammar.
 Do not use ALL CAPS unless you are yelling or emphasizing a point.

 Do not write anything you wouldn’t want your mother/father or boyfriend/girlfriend to read!
 All class work is public.
 Stay on topic.
 If you have a story to share make sure the people in the story agree to your sharing it with the class.
 Cyber bulling will not be tolerated.

 Safety
 Do not publicize your personal information.
 Only use your school account information.
 Report anything that does not sound or look right; if you are not sure then ask me or a parent.

YouTube for school

I chose the video because the guy was fast, fun, and knows what he is talking about. I would use this in my class by making a class blog so we can all have someplace to go to for more information. The advantage of haing it on a blog is for the entire class to be able to get the information from any computer at any time.

American Revolutionary War

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

This has a lot of good pictures and information on it but it has some slides with words over the pictures that are hard to read and some slides have way to much type on them.

slideshare

War Photos

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: photography propaganda)

I like this presentation because the pictures they use are popular ones that I have seen before linked to new ones for today. No words were used so I was able to think for myself.

blog #3 Jigsaw method

After reading about the jigsaw method of teaching I realized that is how my summer foundations of education teacher ran his class. We all had sections to do and then after a few minutes we gave our parts and in the end the entire class learned all the topics. I was not impressed with and did not have fun doing this. After reading the article outlining the jig saw method I think I understand why I have such a hard time with that kind of classroom. Go to http://www.jigsaw.org/overview.htm if you would like to read it yourself. It says that older students have been taught to compete with each other. I would like to take that thought out farther and say that I have been taught to be independent, want to be graded for my own work, and because of that I hate group projects. What is odd considering how I feel about my own student work I picture my classroom as groups of students working together as families, armies, etc. so that they can have a better understanding of how diverse groups lived through the same historical incident. If I only had five computers in the class this jigsaw idea would work just fine because I will have books, magazines, and other information in the room for the students to work with while someone is on the computer. The advantage to only having a few computers would be teaching students to use many different forms of information to meet their needs as well as cooperation. The bad part of only having one computer is time. Sometimes it takes a while to find what you are looking for and middle school classes are not very long each day. I like the jigsaw idea and planed to do something similar in my class before I had even found out it existed.

assignment #2

I went to Google classroom tools for teachers and found three things that I would like to learn more about so that I can use them in my class but also so I can use them myself. I looked at the book search area and saw that I can use this tool when I need to find books on topics. Good to know since I have to write a 25 page paper for another class this semester. As a history teacher this will help my students and I find out more about what ever our topic is. I like the fact that you can read some of the books on line but it also lets you know where to borrow or buy the book if you want to have a hard copy of it. The second thing that I saw was the GEO education section about Google Earth, geography, and maps. I think students should be able to see the area that they are learning about, what it looks like, where it is, how big it is, etc. This will be a great tool to help us all figure out where things happened and visualize what those people saw. It helps make history "real" if you can see where it happened, at least that is how I feel. The Google groups tool will be great for the groups I hope to be able to use. I want to set up families, armies, and nations in my class. Google groups will make my idea work. Google docs is something I am going to have to learn more about before I understand it. For now I know that it can help me and my students to work together to understand and create what ever we need to for the lessons. As a teacher it will be great to see who is doing so I can give credit and help where it is needed.