The Educators' Royal Treatment

Shmoop: Online Learning Guides and Teacher Resources

by Emily Embury

Shmoop makes learning fun and relevant, with free Learning Guides in seven subjects: literature, poetry, bestsellers, history, civics, biography, and music. Shmoop uses a conversational tone in combination with pop culture, trivia and humor to help make topics approachable and relevant to high school students. Shmoop Learning Guides are written by educators and experts, and contain analysis, questions, quotes, and multimedia for each topic.

Shmoop has introduced Teacher’s Editions for 18 of its most popular Learning Guides, including Hamlet and Twilight. Its Teacher’s Editions provide free access to standards-based activities and related interdisciplinary readings. Premium teacher resources are also available, including discussion and essay questions, quizzes, and activities for relating the topic to current events and pop culture.

Educators can learn more about Shmoop by visiting the new Teacher Resources Center, which features examples and ideas from teachers and librarians to help educators integrate Shmoop into the classroom. Take a Shmoop video tour and explore the new teacher resources as well as Shmoop’s expanding library of Teacher’s Editions and Learning Guides.

30 Students Win Students Speak! Countdown to Copenhagen Contest

by Sandy Fash
Countdown to Copenhagen Winners!

Illustrating their passion for addressing climate change issues, 30 elementary, middle and high school students from around the world have been named winners of the Students Speak! Countdown to Copenhagen Contest, hosted by ePals and Conservation International’s "Team Earth" campaign. The winning submissions will be hand-delivered to world leaders attending the Copenhagen Climate Conference this month.

The Students Speak! Contest was designed to provide world leaders, scientists and other influential dignitaries a representation of what students think about climate change. The contest asked students to address these leaders in the form of a song, poem, speech, presentation, or video, and encouraged students to answer questions such as: What would you say to world leaders about climate change? And what actions would you ask them to take?

Ten winning entries were chosen in each age group category (ages 5-10, 11-13 and 14-18).  Of these 30 winning entries, 15 were chosen as overall winning submissions. To view a list of the top 30 winners, including the top 15 winners overall, and their submissions, visit www.epals.com/teamearth/climatechangecontest.

Earlier this fall, ePals joined national consumer brands Dell, SC Johnson, Starbucks, and Wrigley, and three non-profit organizations, Conservation International, Rocky Mountain Institute and Prince’s Rainforest Project, to announce the formation of "Team Earth," a global sustainability movement.

The Team Earth Focus Area on the ePals Web site (www.epals.com/teamearth) offers an interactive, safe focus area for students worldwide to engage in competitions, voice their opinions and get involved. The Students Speak! Contest encouraged students, parents and educators to countdown to Copenhagen with the help of free resources on sustainability efforts available on the ePals Team Earth Focus Area.

Outside of the contest, students can get involved by joining "Team Earth," getting their classrooms on the map, reviewing resources about important environmental issues, and uploading user-generated content to highlight ideas about how they will help save our planet. To date, students from more than 115 countries have signed on to be a member of "Team Earth."  Have your students?

Teaching With Ken Burns' "The National Parks: America's Best Idea"

by Kristen Plemon

Did you catch Ken Burns' highly acclaimed six-part documentary series, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" on PBS? Now, you can bring "The National Parks" into your classroom to create an engaging tour of the nation’s historic and natural treasures while teaching students core curriculum lessons and 21st century skills.

Filmed over ten years, “National Parks” is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone. Using archival photographs, first-person accounts of historical characters, personal memories and analysis from more than 40 interviews, and stunning cinematography, the film traces the birth of the national park idea and follows its evolution for nearly 150 years through the stories of the people who helped create and save them.

Complementing the film project is a collection of new digital education resources that are designed for middle and high school grade levels and cover art, language arts, science, and several social studies disciplines, such as history, geography, economics, and civics. The resources include online video clips, standards-based lesson plans, day-trip activities, and discussion guides for the Untold Stories mini-documentary series, and several digital storytelling modules. All of the resources  are now available through PBS Teachers (pbsteachers.org), the Web portal to PBS’ preK-12 educational services and its searchable library of more than 9,000 local and national standards-based instructional resources, including on-demand video, lessons plans, student activities, and games.

One of the highlights among the unique resources are the place-based digital storytelling modules, which provide video screencasts along with printable quick-start guides to demonstrate how you can use the latest technologies to create digital storytelling projects. The modules cover basic to advanced level technology skills, such as uploading photos to Flickr, using Google Earth, geotagging, video editing and special effects, sharing stories on the “National Parks” site to a part of a public collection, and more.

PBS Teachers and Classroom 2.0 are also hosting a webinar tonight, "Teaching with Ken Burns' 'The National Parks: America's Best Idea,'" which will focus on digital storytelling and other free resources and tools, like ArcGIS. If you miss it, an archive of the webinar will be made available here.

Janet English, award-winning teacher and blogger for PBS Teachers, offers tips on using the “National Parks” resources with VoiceThread, an online tool that allows users to create and share collaborative, multimedia slide shows, on the Media Infusion blog.You can learn more about the "The National Parks" documentary series and accompanying resources, which were produced by WETA and Florentine Films and funded by several companies and foundations, at pbs.org/nationalparks.

All Schools Should Skype

by Eric Sheninger
Principal, New Milford High School (NMHS), located in Bergen County, NJ

Last fall I was at a workshop and was intrigued to learn how schools were using Skype in the classroom. Needless to say I was sold immediately on the educational possibilities. Upon returning to school made it a mission to pass on this information thinking that all of my teachers would be as enthusiastic about it as I was. I had never used the program, but all I heard was how easy it was to Skype. I soon developed this vision of walking around my building and seeing multiple classrooms using Skype to engage our students like never before. So I sent out a very detailed email to my entire staff explaining how easy it was to set up Skype and ways in which it could be used during instruction. With these step by step instructions I was sure that it would only take days before teachers began to use this Web 2.0 technology as a free video conference tool.

Weeks and months went by and I heard nothing about Skype. If this wasn’t bad enough, I then did some investigating and found that none of my teachers had used it at all. So where did I go wrong?  Some pondering led me back to knowledge acquired during my administrative training. If I wanted my staff to buy into using a type of technology, no matter how simple it is to use, I had to model how to use it for educational purposes. Now I had a plan! So over the summer I learned how to Skype and trained a few of my staff members. Using Delicious I collected links on how Skype was being used for education. My passion and excitement became contagious after engaging in a few discussions with staff members.  Finally, my vision of teachers using Skype in the classroom was about to become a reality.

At this point, I cannot take any credit for what I am about to write about. One of the teachers that I had Skype discussions with was Colleen Tambuscio. Colleen teaches a Holocaust course at NMHS and takes 10-12 students on a Holocaust Study tour every year to Europe. The following is some background information on the program taken from the NJ School Report Card Narrative:

New Milford High School offers students a comprehensive Holocaust/Genocide education program. This program is run by Colleen Tambuscio, the 2005-2006 Bergen County Teacher of the year. The course includes an instructional component both within the classroom setting and beyond. Activities include the following:

• an elective course entitled The Holocaust and Human Behavior
• a two day educational seminar to The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC
• a day-long symposium with Holocaust survivors
• a funded overseas experiential learning opportunity to study the Holocaust at sites in Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland.

The goal of the program is to provide students with educational experiences that help foster an understanding of the value of all human life and that challenge students to examine their personal attitudes and behaviors while grappling with the historical complexity of the Holocaust era.

Colleen was already familiar with Skype as she had used it for personal reasons, but was now excited to utilize it in the classroom. Let me tell you, she had some fantastic ideas.

On Monday September 14th, Colleen “Skyped in” a guest speaker, Shalmi Barmore, from Israel for her Holocaust class. The topic of the lesson for the day was to define the term "genocide" and analyze this definition as it related to the term "Holocaust". Mr. Barmore was able to give historical insight into the creation and use of the term "genocide" and the history behind labeling the genocide that took place during WWII as "The Holocaust". Mr. Barmore shared scholarly information on the use of these terms from his years of experience in education at Yad Vashem - Israel's Holocaust memorial.  Students were able to interact directly with Mr. Barmore in real time through a vibrant discussion. Colleen also plans to Skype to her Holocaust classes from Europe this spring when on the Study Tour!

 

In a recent email this week, Colleen explained to me other ways that she plans to use Skype in the classroom. I have included these below:

 

“Last night I had dinner with a friend of mine from USHMM who is the expert on Latin America and the Holocaust. She was in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay for a month working with local schools and teachers. She worked with a teacher and students in Uruguay on a survivor project. Their local survivor stories were not documented anywhere. Through the registry at USHMM she set up an opportunity for the students to document their local survivor stories which were not in the database at the Museum. This is exactly what we will be doing this year in Trsice, videotaping and writing up the stories of local survivors in the Trsice/Olomouc region that have not been documented.

So as you can imagine, we will be documenting these for the registry at USHMM.  Prior to this initiative, she is going to set us up with the students in Uruguay so we can SKYPE and have a conversation about the process involved in this project. They don't speak English so I asked Lisette Morel this morning if she could interpret for us and she was thrilled to help out." 

LOTS OF POTENTIAL HERE!

 

“Today in Holocaust class first period and as a result of a discussion in my 8th period yesterday, we emailed the author of a book we are reading on the Armenian Genocide some questions about Armenian survivor understanding of the Holocaust.  What did they think after their ordeal about the Holocaust?  Why is there such Armenian discontent in their culture against the Jews?  Does this stem from their time in Turkey or is religious indifference? etc.  Lots of great questions.  I know the author because he has spoken at our CHE (Council of Holocaust Educators) conferences in the past.  He will respond to the kids.  Then, we asked him if he would SKYPE into our class next week so we can discuss these issues !!! I'll let you know.”

 
Simple, free technology such as Skype can add a whole new dimension to the learning process.  As educators we can now easily move beyond the walls of the classroom and provide authentic-learning experiences for our students that are relevant, meaningful, and engaging. With this being said, it is teachers like Colleen Tambuscio that make this happen in classrooms across the globe.  Bottom line is this: I am so glad that I learned to Skype!

RobberBaronBook: Moodle Teaching Idea

by Carla Beard

My colleague Shawn was showing me what he's doing with Moodle in his U. S. History class. They have been studying the industrialists of the late 19th century. As a review, students are creating Facebook-style pages for prominent men from that time period. Shawn calls the project "RobberBaronBook."

To help students focus on content, Shawn provided a framework for the project. He created a word processing document that is formatted with the same information found on a typical Facebook page: age, gender, relationship status, friends, interests, and more:

He uploaded the template to Moodle and created a link. Students can access it with a single click.

Because the document is digital, students have 2 options for completing the task. First, they can access it during class, during study hall, or from home and work with it, saving drafts via Moodle's assignment module. When they are ready, they can turn it in via the same module. Shawn will be able to grade it online, adding comments that only the other student will see.

The second option is for students who don't have web access from home. They can print the template out and add to it by hand with pictures from magazines and other comments. They will still provide the content that will help Shawn assess their understanding. They'll just do it a different way.

Shawn has created an engaging activity using 2 of Moodle's modules. He has enabled students to incorporate the results of their research and learning and to share, via classroom projector, their final results. The fact that they'll have a lot of fun with it is icing on the cake.

History Research Competition Winners!

History Research Winners Announced by ABC-CLIO

ABC-CLIO’s (http://www.abc-clio.com/schools/) History Research Competition for Middle and High School Students released its winners.The competition is endorsed by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) --http://www.socialstudies.org/.

The competition encourages students to “Think Historically”.

The five high school and three middle grade teams were honored for exemplary research that defended their choice of the top 10 people, events and places that shaped history. Each team and its school will receive more than $60,000 in cash and prizes.

Here are winning teams, curriculum category in which they competed, and their teacher/coaches:

High School

Harpeth Hall School, Nashville, Tenn.
Teacher/Coach: Dr. Mary Ellen Pethel, Social Studies
Curriculum Category: Ancient World History

Columbia High School, Maplewood, N.J.
Teacher/Coach: JD Robinson, Social Studies
Curriculum Category: Geography

Skyview Junior High, Bothell, Wash.
Teacher/Coach: Marcus Steele, Social Studies
Curriculum Category: Modern World History (1500 CE through present)

Portland High School, Portland, Tenn.
Teacher/Coach: Helena Baier/Michelle Gilliam, Social Studies
Curriculum Category: U.S. Government and Civics

Northwest High School, Cincinnati, Ohio
Teacher/Coach: Bethany Miller, Librarian
Curriculum Category: U.S. History

Middle Grades

Solomon Schechter Day School, St. Louis, Mo.
Teacher/Coach: Mary Winslow, Sue Albert, Social Studies
Curriculum Category: Ancient Civilizations

Ferndale Middle School, High Point, N.C.
Teacher/Coach: Karen Lloyd, Media Specialist
Curriculum Category: U.S. History

Skyview Junior High, Bothell, Wash.
Teacher/Coach: Marcus Steele, Social Studies
Curriculum Category: World History: Middle Ages to Contemporary Times

ABC-CLIO www.abc-clio.com is a publisher of reference 
titles, academic and general-interest books, electronic resources, 
and books for librarians and other professionals. ABC-CLIO 
publishes under five imprints, including Greenwood Press, which publishes books on secondary and higher education curriculum topics.