Individual Education Plan

For my Individual Education Plan (IEP), I created an iMovie Unit for my 11th Grade U.S. History class. All of my students learned how to create an iMovie, how to organize information into a story format, and how to tease out the significance of an historic event. The unit went through storyboards, creating a bibliography, researching, and writing a script.

Throughout the unit, I made time to help individual students as well as the entire class. We spent time in the computer lab at the high school, and I spent a lot of time outside of class working with students who needed help. We also spent time in the classroom working with iMovie, and mapping out our stories.

Students got to select a historic topic from a list of 100 significant events of the 20th century. One of the highlights of the project was watching them work on a project about a subject they were interested in. Topics ranged from the 1918 influenza epidemic to the falling of the Berlin Wall and the origins of jet travel.

For my iMovie, I chose Nixon's historic visit to China in the early 1970s. You can see it by clicking here.

To see the unit's lesson plans, click here.

Click here to see my iMovie grading rubric, and click here to see the storyboard from my iMovie (the model I used for my students).

Digital Story

My second iMovie, "Nixon Visits China," is now posted on Youtube. Click here to watch it.
I had a great time making the movie, and I am becoming a bit more comfortable with the iMovie program.

To help me organize my story, I created a storyboard, which you can see here. I used this storyboard to show my students how I went from an idea to an organized and informative iMovie.

I had my students make historic iMovies as well, which was one of the highlights of the year. To grade their iMovies, I created a rubric, which you can see here.

I enjoyed using the iMovie program a lot, and most of my students did as well. Each student chose their own topic (from a list of historic events), and it was great watching the students make something their own about a topic they were interested in.

I hope to do it again!

A Professional Conversation

During my brief tenure in the world of teaching, I have enjoyed the feedback and counsel of the veteran teachers at the Juneau Douglas High School. I have also benefited from the numerous, less formal conversations I have had with teachers I meet everywhere I go.

However, I have also drawn inspiration and support from perusing the National Council for Social Studies website.

They list resources of all sorts, from Advocacy to Teacher Training, Classroom Management tools to standards, lesson plans, and numerous other resources. I use the website mostly for lesson plan ideas, although there are also great links to other websites, for example:

California Newsreel & What Kids Can Do.

NCSS is a great resource.

Assistive Technologies for Reading

The authors, both Special Education instructors at eh University of Kentucky, carefully promote reading (and writing) assistive technologies for students with learning disabilities. They make the case that too often “regular” educators (as opposed to special education educators) do not know of readily available, easy to use technologies that can greatly assist students with learning disabilities. Such technologies can “break down barriers to full literacy in two ways: as a reading support” to help students “successfully access grade-level text as they read, and as a reading intervention, meaning that the technology helps students strengthen and improve their overall reading skills.”

See the full review by clicking here.

The Overdominance of Computers

Lowell Monke’s article “The Overdominance of Computers,” does more than take a critical look at the role of technology in the classroom. The author makes a strong argument for using the classroom, particularly at the elementary level, as a platform for increasing children’s internal and external capacities for human-based interaction. While quick to explain that technology should not be eliminated from today’s curriculum, the author argues that we must better understand our world and ourselves in order to better use the fruits (technologies from the mundane to the exotic) of our growing technological world. Furthermore, the greater the technology, the more removed we are from its tangible results, the greater the need for such understanding. Education can, and should, be a vehicle for such understanding.

Read a full reflection on the article by clicking here.

YouTubed!

Well, I finally did it! I posted an iMovie about my educational philosophy on Youtube. Yikes! It's my first iMovie, and it shows! It was pretty challenging putting the video together. IMovie is an intuitive program, and the video looks a lot better than when I first put it together. Still, there are some technical issues that I could not resolve.

My educational philosophy has certainly changed over the past year of student teaching, and I am still establishing its contours. In short, this "movie" feels a lot like a "snapshot." I greatly appreciated the opportunity to put something into "print," or "movie" in this case. It forced some intangible thoughts onto a canvass, where I can re-examine and re-contour them as my teaching evolves.

View my educational philosophy video by clicking here.

Websites I Dig

Check out a few of my favorite U.S. History links!

Click here to see the list.