How did I live before Youtube?

So, last year, after fighting for years and promising that we wouldn't spend every class watching videos of cats using the toilet or pandas crying, my district decided to unblock YouTube!  I had known what a powerful tool this would be for the classroom because I had been illegally ripping videos and burning them to CDs for years.  As a Department Chair, I was a little amazed at how fast my department jumped on the bandwagon.  Seeing that this was something new I thought it might take a year or two for people to feel really comfortable with it.  Well, obviously YouTube is what spans the generations because my teachers jumped on it so fast that only one teacher asked for any DVDs last year and those were merely to have in our library for emergency sub plans.  So my next step was figuring out how I could help them vet the sources out there.  As I played around with YouTube I have found that Playlists is my answer!

For me, Playlists can be used for two reasons.  First this was a great way for me to organize content by grade level and share the entire Playlist with my teachers.

I created ones for each grade that I called Singles where I would just put singular movies that matched the content.  

There is also a fabulous thing that Playlists allows you to do.  Many of the videos uploaded have been split into multiple parts in order to meet upload criteria.  In order to show these as one full movie,  pull them all into a Playlist in order.  When you choose to Play All, it plays all of the videos together as one.  Brilliant!

I just recently showed one of my kiddos' favorites:  Future Fright:  Losing the Bill of Rights.

It is a Discovery School Movie that details what life would be like if we suddenly lost the Bill of Rights (it also stars Timothy Busfield so all of us old people can give a "What up?" For Thirty Something!). The kids love it but I find it funny because they think the video is "long" (it's 24 minutes long).  I guess gone are the days of watching a movie over multiple class periods.  Usher in the era of YouTube!  Come on over to my YouTube Channel and see all the great middle school social studies movies I've found!!
Click here: http://www.youtube.com/user/mrswilkinshms?feature=mhee

QR codes.... Linking life together

Originally posted on Weebly 1/20/2012

So, although this has nothing to do with teaching, I totally think I could make it work in a classroom and eventually be a rich alternative to the in class presentation.
I am a scrapbooker. Back in the day I used to spend hours at AC Moore or Michael's buying the right paper or vellum word art. I would save my photos and memorabilia in a pretty box and spend days on the actual layout. Then I had kids and stuff got real. The dog ate my glue stick. The beautiful, chunky first born son would sit on the paper and rip the embellishments. I actually have a page detailing the day he was born and the dates and times are wrong. This was my first child! I can believe getting it wrong for my pixie girl of a second child because my brain has turned to Gouda, but you remember everything about the first.
I then began digital scrapbooking and fell in love. I used iRemember for Macs and adored that I could use paper and embellishments over and over. Gone were the days of only scrapbooking during the summer.
Our Mac began to die and I acquired an iPad so now I use Coolibah. They have partnered with my favorite scrapbooking artist so that makes me very happy. I also love that I can scrap in bed while watching Downton Abbey....sometimes life is pure serendipity. 
Awhile ago I saw this great idea on some link on Pinterest. I obviously take thousands of pictures and videos of the Prince and Princess. In order to solidify the events together, the post suggested I scrapbook a QR code of my video onto my scrapbook page. I usually upload my videos to Vimeo (and larger videos to YouTube but I mark them as private) so this totally made sense. So voila!!!!

Isn't that just darn amazing? I love how they are integrated and long after the immediate memory is gone we can relive these events with multimedia. 
Sooo...... Can you see how this could work in the class? I do a great poster project on the inventors of the Industrial Revolution with a major focus on the question, "Which region of the United States most benefitted from these inventions, i.e. cotton gin, steel tipped plow, textile mill, etc.?". Students have to present their poster to the class. Wouldn't it be fun for them to give their presentation and upload it to Youtube and then to embed the QR code into the project? I can even see posting these up in the hall and having the kids experience a talking museum! Oh the ideas that have poured forth!!!

Change is good

Originally posted 1/19/2012 on Weebly
Although I have been teaching the same subject for twelve years, my ADD kicks in constantly and I always feel the need to change how I attack each unit. This doesn't always end in success and many times I've gone back to what I did the year before. Sometimes, though, it really pays off.
Although I have alway been happy with my Bill of Rights unit, I decided to jazz it up a bit this year. I used to give an illustrated explanation of the Bill of Rights but this year I decided to do a foldable. After nine years away from using interactive notebooks, I've decided to launch it again next year. When I first had students keep interactive notebooks all those years ago, foldables hadn't even been imagined. Now Dinah Zike has entire books on foldable activities created especially to fit into notebooks. I've decided to start to integrate notebook activities into my binders this year as practice.







At the end of our discussion on the Bill of Rights, I gave the kiddos a homework assignment that asked them to name the most useless of the amendments and the most important.



When they came in the next day, I had made a grid on the board representing the ten amendments. They were to put a green sticky on the most important amendment and an orange sticky on the one they felt we could live without. I then asked them to tell me what they noticed. In each class, this led to deep conversations mostly concerning the usefulness of the 9th amendment and we continued our discussion on how some of these things seem like nonnegotiables but maybe that's because we have had these freedoms for over two hundred years. My favorite insight was into the lack of stickies for the eighth amendment. One student commented that although that amendment doesn't matter to him because he is fourteen he like knowing it is there just in case he ever needs it:). 





After we finished our discussion, we watched a BrainPop on the Bill of Rights and then this very fun video I found on YouTube.

We were able to just start our next activity where the students created law firms and I present them with various scenarios dealing with the amendments and they need to identify the amendment for each case. For each one they get right they receive $100 Wilkins' dollars.



I'm really glad I tried some new activities this year. I think I have improved the unit!!

Afternote:  The kiddos also love the Student Rights Video on BrainPop.  It really helped them understand that they have rights, but being in a school makes it a little different.

Sometimes the Darndest Things Work

Originally posted on Weebly 1/15/2012

Ha!  Sometimes you try the simplest little things and you get the hugest return.  When my kiddos come into class, their first job everyday is to complete the "Do Now" list before we can begin class.  The list is in the same place everyday and written in green for consistency.  The "Do Now" includes writing down the homework, updating their table of contents in their binder, completing a geography bonus question and taking out their homework.  Some of my classes were able to get into the swing of getting this done daily by the beginning December.  I have one class, though, that was really struggling and every day it would eat up over ten minutes.  I even tried using some Fun Timers and although they loved the timers, it really didn't make them want to complete the tasks.
In absolute desperation, and almost as a joke, I started to look around for a virtual ticker, like those at the Stock Exchange.  I couldn't find one but it gave me an idea.  I wanted a visual remembrance that moved to catch their eye and get them movin' and groovin'.  I decided to go to my one of my favorite tech creators, Animoto.  I created one slide on PowerPoint that stated "Complete the Do Now!".  I imported that picture, duplicated it multiple times and used the tools on Animoto to add text, (i.e. Do Now!  Do Now!  Do Now!).  I chose a generic rock song (royalty free of course because that's how Animoto rolls).  Voila!  Instant reminder video!!!!
So although I made this totally on a whim and almost as a joke to myself...... IT TOTALLY WORKED!!!!  Holy productivity Batman!  My husband told me not to use the music because he felt that would be too distracting.  I tried it after a couple of days, as an experiment, and the music made the experiment even more successful!  Somehow the music centered them even more and seemed to tap into their auditory learning.  These kids come in, now, and really start to get organized and prepared without a single reminder! 

One of my classes really doesn't need this reminder but I decided to use the video with them a couple of days after my initial launch.  One of my brightest students said to me, "Mrs. Wilkins.... this is a brilliant idea!".  I love when I'm brilliant and I really don't try.  If you aren't able to h it:)view the embed below, click here to go on over to Animoto and watch it :)

Google Docs and ICivics walked into a bar....

Originally posted on Weebly 1/12/2012

So although I absolutely loooooove iCivics, I have found their sign up process for students to be iffy at best. In one class during one period I could only sign up 2/3 of the kids. To this day I have two kids that can't sign up no matter what email they use. I had wanted to give students bonus points if they played so many minutes a month but that really wasn't possible. I figured out a solution to my problem when iCivics sent me an email last month announcing they were launching a new game called "We the Jury". The game placed students on a jury where they had to collaborate to decide guilt or innocence.





To offer this assignment as a bonus but hold the kids accountable for playing the game for a decent amount of time I decided they could write a review of the video game. To do this, we used Google Drive.



I created a form and embedded it into my classroom website. The students had to reflect on what they learned, whether they would recommend this game to another middle schooler and include information that swayed their decision.







I felt like I got a really good glimpse of the experiences the kids had while playing the game and I think I'm going to email the comments to iCivics. We are in the midst of a government unit right now and I think I'm going to use this method so they can experience some other games and take me along for the ride. Do any of you use iCivics? What results have you had?