(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...

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...

Getting my blog set up I’m a little embarrassed that as a digital native I have little to no experience with blogs. This is definitely going to be a learning experience for me, but I’m ready for it! The instructional video made setting up my blog fairly easy. I occasionally had to refer back to it, but the setup is user-friendly. In fact, what I struggled with the most was coming up with a name for my blog. I started out with generic ideas like Katie’s Corner, but most of what I came up with was already taken. Finally, I used a strategy from my Yearbook and Newspaper days and started brainstorming words that had to do with myself and blogging. Obviously I ended up blending my last name, Sholl, and the word soliloquy. I look forward to continue playing around with my blog and personalizing it. Uses in the classroom I’ve been thinking about how I might use blogs in my classroom. I could have my students keep a personal blog throughout the year and have them use it almost like ...