Buie,+Ashleigh+Brigman-Cool+Tools+Review

The Cool Tools sessions I attended were very informative and enlightened me to several tools that I was unaware of. Some of the tools I personally thought were the most beneficial to me were; tricider, voki, go animate, kiva, irubric, and sock puppets. While there were some tools I was already familiar with it was nice to have a refresher on them to keep them fresh in my mind. The breakout sessions on global connections and the Social Studies group was the most beneficial to me. In the global connections session I enjoyed learning about Kiva and have already decided to start a project with my Social Studies class this year using it. While in the global connections session I also learned about free rice from a colleague and I am planning to explore it more as well. In my content specific breakout session for social studies I was exposed to scim-c for the first time and I know that I will be using this for reading primary source documents in my classroom on a regular basis. I also really appreciated the scim-c method because I am coming out of ELA to go back to social studies and I know the pressure ELA teachers face when trying to get students to read and process the information they are reading, the scim-c method is a great way to get students to process the information they are reading. I also really enjoyed Gapminder and chronozoom as well. These tools will be especially important for my students who, like I, need to visualize information. The cool tools session were extremely helpful and I envision using most of the tools discussed in my classroom this year. I am excited to get back in my classroom and try them out.

Lesson: ES 7.H.1.2 and 7.H.1.3 Guiding Question: What can we learn about the time period by reading a primary source document? Students will begin by posting to edmodo their first thoughts on what primary source documents can tell us about a time. Students will think, pair, share. Delving deeper into the Age of Exploration and Colonization students will read and interpret the Charter given to Sir Walter Raleigh. Using the Avalon project as the source they will read using the scim-c method and post their responses to their edmodo class pages. They will summarize what they have learned by creating a voki to answer the guiding question and will share it with the class.