A Few Gifts in December

For the past few months I have been loving what is going on in my classroom. In December, students were doing on some great, inquiry/project based learning.

Western Civilization students worked in groups to create an Art Gallery Tour, answering the question, "How did the Renaissance bring us both back to the past and into the future?" Students used Power Point, Prezi, or Google Presentation to put together the works of art and then use www.screecast-o-matic.com to narrate the screencast. I talked a little about the Explore-Flip-Apply approach I used with this here. The products were great. I was really pleased with their command of the content. I also like how some of their personalities came through in the tours, like this one.

My United States history course, had followed more of a "flipped-101" style. Now that we have progressed through the year, I wanted to step it up. We briefly went through information on Manifest Destiny. To get the students to process the information and create something meaningful, I turned to this awesome post, 15 Assessments that Don't Suck. I decided to use the Notecard Confessions assessment. I found it very valuable to have students approach Texas Independence and the Mexican-American War from the perspective of Mexico. It was so nice to come alongside groups, checking in and encouraging them to add more in various areas. It really helped students to not settle for the result being "good enough." But instead they know I am there to push them and support them to do their best.