Happy President's Day! A celebration of our founding father, George Washington. His birthday is later this week, and the government wants to celebrate! So they gave us a day off! Except ... I am working. :) Those of you not working, enjoy your day off.
The good news to working on President's Day, if we are looking for good news, I learned about a few tools today that I can use in my classes, and to continue my professional development.
When you find something interesting - you should share it and tell someone! So that is what this post is about.
Today during a PD session geared towards using technology in the classroom, I was introduced to Edmodo. Its a teacher facebook :) I haven't spent a lot of time with it yet, BUT the part I have found to be helpful is the PLC groups. I have subscribed to the professional development and social studies groups. Teachers can post questions, post ideas, help one another out. Pretty great. There are a lot of other perks to the site, but I haven't used them yet. I am looking forward to exploring more. Eventually, I would like to get my students signed up and we can communicate through the site for assignments / discussion boards/ reading analysis... the options are endless.
Specifically for the Social Studies teachers: http://sheg.stanford.edu/
I have seen this site before, but haven't spent a lot of time on it. After spending some time on the website today, I found a lot of great materials to use in class on our next unit - The Cold War. This site uses documents for students to analyze. They are given an essential question - and by using the documents they are given, they form an opinion. It is aligned with Common Core - which, of course, is awesome!
Any other good recommendations? Leave a comment, and let me know!
