Module #4: Active Learning

Quick Update

Hey all! I can not believe that we are already more than halfway through the first quarter of the school year! The students are officially settled in and ready to go at the start of each class, and the content is flowing. I feel like these last couple of weeks have been a breakthrough for some of my less active classes. I have been seeing far more engagement and participation in some of the more introverted students in the classroom. We have been discussing the characteristics of complex civilizations in World History. The students have really been enjoying analyzing sources from ancient Mesopotamia.

Active Learning

As a history teacher I oftentimes find myself reflecting on how I can make my content more engaging for my students. History is a subject that is oftentimes considered tedious and boring by many students. As educators it is our jobs to ensure that our students are fully immersed and actively engaging in the content that we are trying to teach to them. I am always on the hunt to find new fun and engaging ways to teach history to my students. After reading through Nicole Zumpano's blog post, which spoke on an educator named Ms. Malhiot who implemented PicCollage and Audioboom to showcase student learning on the American Revolution. Students used these resources to insert themselves into various images representing different events during the American Revolution. Although this blogpost is from 2015, this form of assessment has aged wonderfully in my opinion, and is absolutely something that I would implement in my own classroom. I highly value the use of technology for assessments, and this particular assessment strategy allows students to create visual representations of their learning while being very entertaining as well. Although this activity can be very engaging, I do believe that there are opportunities to further stretch this assignment into a more rigorous one. Scaffolding this activity into more steps rather than simply having students embed themselves into images from the American Revolution, would be a great first step into ensuring more rigor during this lesson. One idea would be to have students show that they have an understanding of the image of the American Revolution that they have edited. Another idea would be to have them edit their face onto that of an important figure during the American Revolution and explain the role that "they" played in the war. These ideas create opportunities for students to show that they have learned important details about the historical event, rather than simply show that they are able to use PicCollage and Audioboom.

I have attached a screenshot below of my Padlet in response to Nicole Zumpano's blog post. The Padlet has a link to the original blog post from Nicole, as well as my overall assessment of the active learning strategy discussed in the blog post. I summarize the activity, talk about the strengths and characteristics of active learning found in the activity, and I discuss the potential weaknesses and areas of growth for this particular activity. Reflecting on Nicole's blogpost and Ms. Malhiot's American Revolution activity has sparked a new creative thought process for me as a history teacher. Prior to my assisted discovery of this blogpost, my idea of active learning in my classroom revolved around think pair share and socratic seminar based activities. I am now considering teaming up with our computer science teacher, who regularly teaches and implements Adobe Photoshop in his class, to have him assist in an activity like the one used in Ms. Malhiot's class. 

Source: Blog Author's Padlet