(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...

Focus for this week This week I focused on scaling back my interactive presentation. I felt like my first presentation was not worth the time I spent working on it. I probably could have found a more productive learning activity that required less work. This week, it took me around 30 minutes to do my presentation and I felt that it had a solid amount of content. My presentation is designed to be used in Present mode, and is something that I could use during instruction, my students could use as a study tool, and has potential to be an example for something they can create on their own. Below are some pictures of my checks and balances presentation: Checks and balances of the US federal government are usually taught with a visual aid because it can be a confusing process! This is the starting place on the presentation and students can choose which branches or directions they want to view first by clicking on the title or an arrow. This page is called the Clean Slate! page and c...

Interactive Slides Background This week I worked on creating an interactive resource using Google Slides. This was the first time I really created something interactive via Google Slides, so it took me a while to get everything set up. My first step was to mentally come up with a game plan on how I wanted my interactive slides to work. After I knew what I wanted, I created my slides and added the content (this week my topic was the three branches of US government). Once I had my content, I started to create links between my slides. One of my goals was that my users would be able to go back and forth between the necessary slides with ease. Below is an example: Users can click on "Lesson" to go straight to the lesson, "Review" to jump to the review, and "Next Class" to see what the topic of the next class will be. I also set my links up so that students can have a choice in the order that they want to go over the content.  Students can decide whi...