(Sholl)iloquy

About iCivics iCivics is a free website that was founded by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice. It focuses on topics that are related to civics and government function. There are a couple of purposes of iCivics. You can sign up as a teacher or a student. I signed up as a teacher, so everything I was seeing is from the teacher's perspective. There are lesson plans and activity ideas for teachers. There are also several activities or games for students to complete on a variety of topics, which teachers also have access to. Underneath the games is the estimated time that it takes to play the game; this is beneficial for planning purposes. When you play the games you get points. After earning points, you can choose to spend those points voting for a choice on impact project. Every three months, iCivics donates money to the impact project with the highest number of points. Using it in the classroom In Virginia, students will at some point...

What is Canva? That was what I asked myself when I was asked to use it for an assignment in grad school about a year ago. Our professor wanted us to make an infographic about something and told us that this resource would be a good one to use.  Canva is a graphic design resource that is available as an app and from its website. I have used both the app and website versions and both run pretty smoothly. I only have the free version which limits what you can do through the app. The upgrade is $12.95 per month. Below are the different features between the versions. There is also Canva Enterprise, but that is primarily for groups of people with 30+ members.  I'm really fine with only having the free version of Canva. I don't think I would use it enough to warrant the Canva for Work version. However, if I ended up using the app a lot I like it enough to consider paying for the upgrade.  One feature that is only in the upgrade is the resizing of designs. I...

Experience with Padlet This week I had decided to review Padlet as a resource. There is a desktop and app version of Padlet. I signed up for the free version, which gives you a limited number of Padlets that you can create and you can only upload files of smaller sizes. You can, of course, upgrade with prices starting at $8.25 a month. To create a Padlet, you can either pick from templates or you can start from scratch. If you start from scratch, you will pick a type of Padlet to create. Below are the options: I wanted to do discussion questions on the U.S. Constitution so I picked the Canvas format, although Backchannel would have worked as well. This is what my Padlet looked like when I was finished: This would be the view as both the creator or someone who is just contributing. To add a comment, you click on the pink + button at the bottom right hand corner. You can the connect the comments with an arrow. One thing that I liked about this app is there are a variety of...

About the Video I was thinking about what kind of activity that a short video could be useful for. (Hint: There are many.) I'm thinking that in my classroom I could do an activity called Four Facts. The topics would vary, but I would have my students create a video that shared four facts about a certain topic. For my example, I chose the city of New Orleans. On this example, I chose pretty broad facts: Location, Elevation, Brief History, and Culture. However, this four facts format can really be switched up. You could do four little known facts, important facts, facts I didn't know... There are just a lot of options.  Using Adobe Spark This was my first time using Spark. I created my video using their app because I was traveling this week and it was pretty convenient to use. To get started I was prompted to either start from scratch or use a template. I chose to start from scratch because I didn't see any templates that fit my purpose well. I started building...

Retrieval Practice The best way I can think to describe retrieval practice is to share what Jennifer Gonzalez says in her blog. She says that, " retrieval practice is the act of trying to recall information without having it in front of you ." This probably doesn't seem like a new concept to you. If you're like me, you might have thought of flashcards or tools like Quizlet. These can be ways to do retrieval practice. Some other ways that Gonzalez mentions are low-stakes/no-stakes quizzes or brain dumps. I focused on these last two methods for this activity. I created a quiz on Virginia's geographical regions using Socrative. The quiz could be used as an exit ticket or a warm up for the class after a lesson. This would be a no-stakes quiz since I would not be using it as a grade. If this quiz was a warm up, you could bridge it into a think-pair-share once everyone was done. Socrative This was my first time really using Socrative. Overall, I liked it. I thoug...

My assessment I created a formative assessment on the three branches of government. I could use this as an exit ticket after a lesson or as a warm up in the next class period. My quiz is broken up into three sections for the three branches, with 2-3 questions per section. Why I chose Google Forms First of all, I personally find Google Forms easy to navigate. Since this is a short, formative assessment, I didn't want to spend too much time on the set up. Google Forms also allows you to break up groups of questions into sections. I found this particularly helpful for this topic because I could look at an individual's responses for a certain section.  For example, I can see how this person (me on my trial run) did on the Judicial section. If all or most of the answers are correct then I can infer that they have a good grasp on the judicial branch. Conversely, if they didn't do well on this section, I would infer that they need to review and refer them to an acti...