Tuesday April 17
Today I taught a lesson on Lincoln's assassination and ran it like a murder investigation. I started the class with the wanted poster with Both, Surratt, and Herald on the projector. I then told the students about the anniversary of Lincoln's death that happened over the weekend on the Saturday the 14th, then I told them that they would be solving Lincoln's murder and showed them a clip from the movie Killing Lincoln where Powell attacks the Sewards and Booth assassinates Lincoln.
After the video I pulled up a list of questions for the students to research and answer about the assassination. They had to find out who Booth was, where he was from/why he would want to kill Lincoln, who helped him and what each person was supposed to do, what the original plan was and if it ever changed and if there were any other targets. The students were able to work with their table groups to find the answers and 'solve' the murder.
About ten minutes before class ended I had the students circle back and go over the answers as a class. Instead of me just giving them the answers, I had each table answer one of the questions and if they didn't seem to fully cover everything that happened I asked them clarifying questions and opened those up to the rest of the class so that they could help each other learn and understand what happened.
Friday April 20
Today the students were working on their summative assessment for their leading question: " did it matter who freed the slaves." The student so could choose between it detailed outline, poster or an essay. This could be helpful to me in the future as another option of summative assessments that don't involve a test or quiz and gives the students a choice on how to show what they learned in a way that works best for them. It would also be a great way to get a better understanding of what all they actually learned instead of memorized for a test.
Since it was a work day Mr. Schmidt sent me to Mrs. Beechner's class to see what they were doing with Padlet. Mrs. Beechner had her class go on to Padlet and answer the leading question but also ask questions of their own for their classmates and other teachers and students not in their class to answer so that the students could her from someone that they wouldn't normally see or hear from in their classroom. I could use this in my classroom in the future as a way to see what my students really got from the lessons and have them use the knowledge they gained through those lessons to help their classmates who did not understand the material as well and still have questions.
More About Padlet
After the class on Friday Ms. Beechner and I talked about how the Padlet activity worked and what parts of it did not. She said it was hard to keep all the posts organized and in her second hour the site ran slower, which we decided was because it was the same page as the first hour. We thought that if they made a separate page for each class and copied the important or thought provoking responses and questions to the new page for the next hour to work on it might work better.