Saturday, February 16, 2013

Over 16000 views and still picking up speed

The year is over half done and I have not updated yet.  Strange but true.  I have been having a lot of success with my math class in the second year run through.  I think that the students in the other math class that has another teacher is a bit jealous of the amount of homework.  Most of the views that I have are still from math and I have not made extra math videos this year.  Thankfully math does no change all that much in a year although I am wondering about how the Common Core standards are going to affect what things I need to teach.

I have put all of my PowerPoints for World History on YouTube.  It was hard to find the images and some of them are pretty basic summaries of the chapters.  However,  some of the kids are using them now.  With most of the chapters from the book now done,  I have about 30 World History videos up and running. 

I have doen some with my Non-Western Culture class but not enough.  I did more with a site called WallWisher to have the students post what they know and what they want to know about the different topics.  Shockingly many of them want to eat food from different countries.

In both of these classes I am just starting to use Google Forms to give the students practice tests to prepare them for the real thing.  So far the students seem to like it and appreciate the extra practice. 

I am greatly looking forward to starting up the kid directed wiki this semester.  We just upgraded our bandwidth and now it should be much easier to have the students all working on the different parts of the wiki with video, links, and images than it was before.