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Grades on a formal assessment should not come as a huge surprise to any student.

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Teachers are not required to TEACH any state standards; they are only required to demonstrate that the assigned standards have been learned by all students.

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Teachers are not required to TEACH any state standards; they are only required to demonstrate that the assigned standards have been learned by all students.

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-- Susan Winebrenner

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Retrieval Practice -- Three Key Ingredients for Learning

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Retrieval Practice -- Three Key Ingredients for Learning

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History ReWriter: Best Practice - Corroboration

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History ReWriter: Best Practice - Corroboration

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Explicitly teaching corroboration and citing page numbers in sources helps students reduce the amount of plagiarism in their work. It also teaches them the importance of reading carefully and organizing their notes. This type of work can be down with short readings and the textbook, or with longer book level or article readings that students will encounter in college.

Please note that assignments like this help prevent, but do not totally remove the risk of student cheating. I have found that spot-checking a sample of 5-6 assignments per period often reveals a student’s googling and copying someone else’s work.

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Common Core standards require Social Studies teachers to demonstrate how students corroborate historical details with multiple sources of information to develop a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources. I use this when teaching this skill in my high school Social Studies classes. This is a rigorous task that requires close reading and organization skills. My students frequently realize that they need to improve at including page numbers into their notes, otherwise this assignment requires a second or third read in order to find that information. In the examples below, I have presentation italicized student writing and kept my comments in plain text.

The definition I use for corroboration is the ability to compare information provided by two separate and find similarities between them.
In the film, The Exception, Captain Brandt is tasked with protecting Kaiser Wilhelm II because of the fear that spies might be watching them. These are reported to the Gestapo. In Paullina Simons' novel, The Bronze Horseman , there is also a fear of spies in the Soviet Union, which is why citizens are told to report to the NKVD (1149).
The student below does not use parenthetical citations but instead spells out the page numbers at the beginning of each sentence. This is not consistent in academic writing as it pulls the reader out of the text
Page 19 of With the Old Breed mentions what was considered the first modern head-on amphibious assault of the Battle of Tarawa. Page 603 of The American Vision makes mention of island-hopping in the Pacific and how Tarawa was the Navy's first target in the Pacific.
This student does not include page numbers, which is a red flag that perhaps they did not read the novel, but instead are relying on internet searches to find connections with other historical events. When I can't find the French film available on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I really wonder if the student viewed it.
The French film, La Ralfe , was about the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of July 1942, in which roughly 13,000 Jews living in Paris (4,501 of them children) were removed from their homes by French police and sent to detention camps in the countryside, before being deported to Auschwitz. In the novel, Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah and her family were part of the Vel' d'Hiv just like the people in the movie La Ralfe. In the book Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, the book states how Hitler signed the Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union. "During the preparations for war against Poland, and the signing of the Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union which Hitler pursued to that end, Hitler..." ("Heinrich Hoffmann's Studio." Eva Braun: Life with Hitler , by Heike B. Görtemaker, Verlag C. H. Beck OHG, 2010, p 20.)In the textbook, it says "In August 1939, Hitler stunned the world by announcing a nonaggression pact with his great enemy-Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator." ("World History The Modern World." World History The Modern World , by Ellis Esler, Pearson Education, 2007, p. 465.)
This student has gone overboard and used a full works cited reference instead of an in-text parenthetical citation featuring author last name, page number. See below for a student who has done this succinctly.
Ellis states that, "Within a few days, they were herded into 'shower rooms' and gassed"(472) which is supported when Keneally says that, "At last the victims were driven down a barbed-wire passage to bunkers which had copper Stars of David on their roofs and were labeled 'BATHS AND INHALATION ROOMS' ''(136).
Explicitly teaching corroboration and citing page numbers in sources helps students reduce the amount of plagiarism in their work. It also teaches them the importance of reading carefully and organizing their notes. This type of work can be down with short readings and the textbook, or with longer book level or article readings that students will encounter in college.

Please note that assignments like this help prevent, but do not totally remove the risk of student cheating. I have found that spot-checking a sample of 5-6 assignments per period often reveals a student's googling and copying someone else's work.

For instance, this corroboration "The Japanese invaders treated the Chinese, Filipinos, Malaysians, and other conquered people with great brutality, killing and torturing civilians throughout East and Southeast Asia." (Ellis, 2005, 473). Iris proved this by writing about the killing contest, live burials, mutilation, death by fire,death by ice, death by dogs and rapes (83-89). There is way more terrible things to explain what happened to these Chinese people, but that was enough to explain how badly they were tortured." was done by two different students in different class periods, coincidentally reading the same book and using the same from the internet. What are the odds?

In order to prevent copying like this, simply give students shorter readings and make the corroborations due in one class period. This way all of the readings can be done in class and students don't have time to share their work on classroom backchannels.

CCSS Standards

Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem.

Evaluate an author's premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.

Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.

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Common Core standards require Social Studies teachers to demonstrate how students corroborate historical details with multiple sources of information to develop a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources. I use this presentation when teaching this skill in my high school Social Studies classes.

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Questions, tasks, and resources. Oh, my! Covering content using the C3 IDM

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Questions, tasks, and resources. Oh, my! Covering content using the C3 IDM

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fter five years, most Kansas teachers are at least aware that we’re asking them and students to approach teaching and learning differently.

That we want students to have both foundational knowledge and historical / critical thinking skills. That social studies classrooms need to be more than drill and kill, lecture, worksheet, quiz on Friday. And that creating engaged, informed, and knowledgeable citizens requires more than rote memorization and low level thinking.

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It’s Not About the Right Answer: Using Primary Sources to Help Students Ask the Right Questions

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It’s Not About the Right Answer: Using Primary Sources to Help Students Ask the Right Questions

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DPLA opens up all new possibilities of discovery that will democratize my students’ access to history, from the people and voices that are often marginalized to the cultural heritage treasures that might be hidden in plain sight at a local public library or archive where we didn’t even know to look.

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Over the past year, I had the opportunity to be part of the Digital Public Library of America's inaugural Education Advisory Committee, helping to build a collection of one hundred free Primary Source Sets for educators and students across the country. Though I was ostensibly building educational resources for others, I found this experience to be one of the most impactful professional development experiences I have had in over fifteen years of teaching.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a free national digital library that brings together cultural heritage materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the country, making thousands of collections searchable through a single website. My colleagues and I on the Education Advisory Committee were given the freedom - and the mandate - to create a teacher-driven model for online education resources in the humanities.

As a result, the Primary Source Sets are strongly influenced by our professional expertise as educators. For example, they are designed with the flexibility to use in a multitude of creative and innovative ways across grade levels and structured to appeal to both our students and our peers. Each set has an accompanying teaching guide, but it's not a lesson plan; it's a set of questions designed to get students critically thinking about the sources and what they reveal about our past.

This project was rewarding for me, but I am most excited about the ways it will impact my students. By providing easy access to primary sources and starting with the framework of asking critical questions, the sets will help my students move beyond their textbooks, challenging them to do history by putting the pieces of the story together on their own. And the stories are unlimited; by bringing together items from disparate institutions, DPLA opens up all new possibilities of discovery that will democratize my students' access to history, from the people and voices that are often marginalized to the cultural heritage treasures that might be hidden in plain sight at a local public library or archive where we didn't even know to look.

As I reflect on this experience, I see that from the beginning, it has been framed around the art and skill of asking good questions - of us as educators, by us as researchers, and, most importantly, by our students as critical thinkers.

Question #1 - What and Who is missing from history textbooks?

Too often, our students are miseducated by textbook narratives that lack the multicultural perspectives, complexity, and controversy of historical research and inquiry. Through digital primary sources, new voices and stories are shared and added to the broader narrative. Digital sources, rather than traditional print textbooks, democratize student access to historical archives. For example, students are now just a click away from primary sources by and about African Americans that are, at best, occasionally included in state, university, and national libraries, or are, at worst, absent or marginalized in traditional textbook narratives. In traditional history textbooks, the voices of African Americans tend to be relegated to the sections on slavery and a few leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. My DPLA primary source sets about Negro League baseball, African American soldiers in World World I, and Fannie Lou Hamer can help teachers and students combat those silences.

One of my favorite primary sources in those aforementioned sets is the photograph of African American soldiers with French children in France during World War I. When teaching with this document, I can ask students to write down every question that they have of the photograph. Emphasizing that there are no "wrong" questions, I could then lead students to prioritizing the questions and developing guiding questions that would help them gather information about the photographer's intent and the overall historical context. An example of a question of the photograph could be: Would it have been possible to take this photograph in the United States at the time? Why or why not

Question #2 - Where can I find primary sources on the Internet?

My obvious answer is the DPLA. And, the good news is that the online collection of digital historical artifacts and primary sources continues to grow. Equipped with good historical inquiry skills, students can engage in online history investigations and amass tons of digital primary source evidence. Students may even find digital historical sources that are "hidden gems" from smaller and disparate archival collections. Small newspapers from remote locations in the United States are particularly good at capturing perspectives that are often missing from more general histories. For example, from the DPLA, students could discover a newspaper published in the 1916 by a Native American school from the collection of the Synod of Lakes and Prairies, Presbyterian Church. Additionally, students may also discover a newspaper article published in 1942 about Japanese Internment camps from the Occidental College Library. Along with the DPLA, there are many other online digital repositories from which students can find primary sources. Umbra: Search African American History of the University of Minnesota libraries and the American Memory collection of the Library of Congress are two noteworthy examples.

Question #3 - How is this primary source document relevant to me?

This question is perhaps the most important one for my students. Over the years, I've learned that if my students do not see the relevance of a historical topic, they will care less about historical thinking skills. As a result, I have used a variety of instructional methods to help students see the contemporary implications of historical primary source analysis. I have used primary sources from students' communities, used primary sources to supplement depictions of history in modern films, and used debates about contentious issues to help students discover how relevant primary sources are to their lives. For example, I could ask students to debate the role that professional athletes should play in social movements. Using the DPLA, students could compare Jackie Robinson's letter to President Eisenhower on Civil Rights to LeBron James' stance and actions on Trayvon Martin.

Primary sources can serve as prompts to help students ask general and specific questions related to historical time periods or figures. Rather than finding the "answer," students can tell their own interpretive story through questioning, analyzing, and collecting evidence from multiple digital primary sources. In this way, students analyze and create historical interpretations, and do not regurgitate the often distorted and incomplete narratives of traditional history textbooks.

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It's Not About the Right Answer: Using Primary Sources to Help Students Ask the Right Questions | Edutopia

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Over the past year, I had the opportunity to be part of the Digital Public Library of America's inaugural Education Advisory Committee, helping to build a collection of one hundred free Primary Source Sets for educators and students across the country.

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Our recommendations to make cumulative exams more powerful with small tweaks for you and your students:

Cumulative exams are good, but encourage even more spacing and discourage cramming with cumulative mini-quizzes throughout the semester, not just as an end-of-semester exam.

Be sure that cumulative mini-quizzes, activities, and exams include similar concepts that require careful discrimination from students, not simply related topics.

Make sure you are using spacing and interleaving as learning strategies and instructional strategies throughout the semester, not simply as part of assessments and cumulative exams.

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Retrieval Practice: A Powerful Strategy to Improve Learning

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When it comes to cumulative exams, there are two features to keep in mind:

1. The content on the exam

2. How students study for the exam

Why do these two features matter, and critically, how do they relate to interleaving and spacing?

Spacing: On typical cumulative exams, learning of all content covered throughout the semester or school year is assessed. While cumulative exams may encourage spacing (e.g., students study past topics from earlier in the semester, not just at the end), they may also encourage cramming (e.g., students cram all course material from the entire semester the night before the exam). Yes, students may be re-studying material from months ago - a definite form of spacing - but they may also be simply cramming "in" that spaced information along with lots of other information.*

Interleaving: Although course topics on a cumulative exam are likely to be related (e.g., a large number of key concepts from earth science), they may not necessarily require discrimination (e.g., the atmosphere vs. plate tectonics). In math, for example, a cumulative exam could include problems related to linear equations, polynomials, and irrational numbers. While all of these problems are related to algebra, they are distinct enough that students can still plug and chug for each of the three problem types, without taking advantage of interleaving by mixing up similar problems. In other words, content on a cumulative exam may be related, but does not necessarily take advantage of interleaving.

Our recommendations to make cumulative exams more powerful with small tweaks for you and your students:

Cumulative exams are good, but encourage even more spacing and discourage cramming with cumulative mini-quizzes throughout the semester, not just as an end-of-semester exam.

Be sure that cumulative mini-quizzes, activities, and exams include similar concepts that require careful discrimination from students, not simply related topics.

Make sure you are using spacing and interleaving as learning strategies and instructional strategies throughout the semester, not simply as part of assessments and cumulative exams.

Bottom line: Just because an exam is cumulative does not mean it automatically involves spacing or interleaving. Be mindful of relationships across exam content, as well as whether students are spacing their study throughout the semester or simply cramming before an exam - cumulative or otherwise.

A Spaced Refresher on Interleaving

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Cumulative exams aren't the same as spacing and interleaving. Here's why.

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Are cumulative exams the same thing as spacing or interleaving? Actually, not quite. Cumulative exams can be beneficial for learning. But there are also some subtle ways we can take cumulative exams to the next level - by ensuring that we (and our students) are using spacing and

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Alternative formative assessment (AFA) strategies can be as simple (and important) as checking the oil in your car -- hence the name "dipsticks." They're especially effective when students are given tactical feedback, immediately followed by time to practice the skill. My favorite techniques are those with simple directions, like The 60 Second Paper, which asks students to describe the most important thing they learned and identify any areas of confusion in under a minute.

You can find another 53 ways to check for understanding toward the end of this post, also available as a downloadable document.

In the sections below, we'll discuss things to consider when implementing AFAs.

Observation: A Key Practice in Alternative Formative Assessment

A fundamental element of most AFAs is observation. In her Edutopia post, Rebecca Alber says there is much to learn by taking observational notes as students work in groups. "However," she clarifies, "if it is quiet during this talk time, and they are watching you watch them, they are most likely lost." Another Edutopia blogger, Elena Aguilar witnessed " a fantastic first grade Sheltered English teacher" who directed his students to respond to a story by making hand gestures and holding up picture cards. "In this way, the teacher was able to immediately see who was struggling with the concepts and provide corrective feedback."

By methodically watching and recording student performance with a focused observation form, you can learn a lot about students' levels of understanding in just a few moments. For example, on the Teach Like a Champion blog, watch how math teacher Taryn Pritchard uses an observation sheet, and note her description of how she pre-plans to assess students' mastery levels in only ten seconds. Pre-planning methodical observations allow instructors to efficiently and effectively intervene when it counts most -- the instant students start down the wrong path.

New to Alternative Formative Assessment? Start Slow

The National Capital Language Resource Center recommends the following when introducing alternative assessment for the first time:

Integrate alternative assessments gradually, while still using the traditional assessments.

Walk students through the rubrics and discuss expectations when you introduce assignments.

Learn to score alternative assessments yourself, and then gradually introduce students to self-evaluation.

Teach students how to thoughtfully give each other feedback as you introduce them to peer-response.

A Simple Way to Gain Information from Your Students: Ask Them

When preservice teachers are confused as to why their students performed poorly on an assignment, I gently say, "Did you ask them why?" After all, having learners use their own vernacular to articulate why they are stuck can be profoundly useful for identifying where to target support.

According to the American Institute of Nondestructive Testing, the simplest tool to encourage student self-assessment is evaluative prompts:

How much time and effort did you put into this?

What do you think your strengths and weaknesses were in this assignment?

How could you improve your assignment?

What are the most valuable things you learned from this assignment?

Learners can respond to those prompts using Padlet, a virtual corkboard where many computer users can simultaneously post their responses, followed by a focused whole-class discussion of students' answers. The instructor doesn't always have to develop prompts -- students can invent and submit one or more potential exam questions and answers on relevant content. Tell them that you'll include the best contributions on a forthcoming quiz.

Portfolios are a more complex form of ongoing self-assessment that can be featured during student-led conferences. James Mule, principal of St. Amelia Elementary School in New York, describes how children benefit from the student-led conferences that occur at his institution: "With the student in charge and the teacher acting as a facilitator, the authentic assessment gives students practice in self-evaluation and boosts accountability, self-confidence, and self-esteem." Pernille Ripp's Blogging Through the Fourth Dimension provides all the handouts needed.

The biggest benefit of integrating AFAs into your practice is that students will internalize the habit of monitoring their understanding and adjusting accordingly.

We created the following list as a downloadable reminder to post by your computer. In the comments section of this post, tell us which of these 53 ways you've used for checking on students' understanding -- or recommend other AFAs we should know about.

53 Ways to Check for Understanding

1. Summary Poem Activity

List ten key words from an assigned text.

Do a free verse poem with the words you highlighted.

Write a summary of the reading based on these words.

2. Invent the Quiz
Write ten higher-order text questions related to the content. Pick two and answer one of them in half a page.

3. The 411
Describe the author's objective.

4. Opinion Chart
List opinions about the content in the left column of a T-chart, and support your opinions in the right column.

5. So What? Journal
Identify the main idea of the lesson. Why is it important?

6. Rate Understanding

7. Clickers (Response System)

8. Teacher Observation Checklist

9. Explaining
Explain the main idea using an analogy.

10. Evaluate
What is the author's main point? What are the arguments for and against this idea?

11. Describe
What are the important characteristics or features of the main concept or idea of the reading?

12. Define
Pick out an important word or phrase that the author of a text introduces. What does it mean?

13. Compare and Contrast
Identify the theory or idea the author is advancing. Then identify an opposite theory. What are the similarities and differences between these ideas?

14. Question Stems

I believe that ________ because _______.

I was most confused by X.

15. Mind Map
Create a mind map that represents a concept using a diagram-making tool (like Gliffy). Provide your teacher/classmates with the link to your mind map.

16. Intrigue Journal
List the five most interesting, controversial, or resonant ideas you found in the readings. Include page numbers and a short rationale (100 words) for your selection.

17. Advertisement
Create an ad, with visuals and text, for the newly learned concept.

18. 5 Words
What five words would you use to describe ______? Explain and justify your choices.

19. Muddy Moment
What frustrates and confuses you about the text? Why?

20. Collage
Create a collage around the lesson's themes. Explain your choices in one paragraph.

21. Letter
Explain _______ in a letter to your best friend.

22. Talk Show Panel
Have a cast of experts debate the finer points of X.

23. Study Guide
What are the main topics, supporting details, important person's contributions, terms, and definitions?

24. Illustration
Draw a picture that illustrates a relationship between terms in the text. Explain in one paragraph your visual representation.

25. KWL Chart
What do you know, what do you want to know, and what have you learned?

26. Sticky Notes Annotation
Use sticky notes to describe key passages that are notable or that you have questions about.

27. 3-2-1

Three things you found out.

Two interesting things.

One question you still have.

28. Outline
Represent the organization of X by outlining it.

29. Anticipation Guide
Establish a purpose for reading and create post-reading reflections and discussion.

30. Simile
What we learned today is like X.

31. The Minute Paper
In one minute, describe the most meaningful thing you've learned.

32. Interview You
You're the guest expert on 60 Minutes. Answer:

1. What are component parts of _______?

2. Why does this topic matter?

33. Double Entry Notebook
Create a two-column table. Use the left column to write down 5-8 important quotations. Use the right column to record reactions to the quotations.

34. Comic Book
Use a comic book creation tool like Bitstrips to represent understanding.

35. Tagxedo
What are key words that express the main ideas? Be ready to discuss and explain.

36. Classroom TED Talk

37. Podcast
Play the part of a content expert and discuss content-related issues on a podcast, using the free Easypodcast.

38. Create a Multimedia Poster with Glogster

39. Twitter Post
Define _______ in under 140 characters.

40. Explain Your Solution
Describe how you solved an academic problem, step by step.

41. Dramatic Interpretation
Dramatize a critical scene from a complex narrative.

42. Ballad
Summarize a narrative that employs a poem or song structure using short stanzas.

43. Pamphlet
Describe the key features of _______ in a visually and textually compelling pamphlet.

44. You've Got Mail
Each student writes a question about a topic on the front of an envelope; the answer is included inside. Questions are then "mailed" around the room. Each learner writes her answer on a slip of scratch paper and confirms its correctness by reading the "official answer" before she places her own response in the envelope. After several series of mailings and a class discussion about the subject, the envelopes are deposited in the teacher's letterbox.

45. Bio Poem
To describe a character or person, write a poem that includes:

(Line 1) First name

(Line 2) 3-4 adjectives that describe the person

(Line 3) Important relationship

(Line 4) 2-3 things, people, or ideas the person loved

(Line 5) Three feelings the person experienced

(Line 6) Three fears the person experienced

(Line 7) Accomplishments

(Line 8) 2-3 things the person wanted to see happen or wanted to experience

(Line 9) His or her residence

(Line 10) Last name

46. Sketch
Visually represent new knowledge.

47. Top Ten List
What are the most important takeaways, written with humor?

48. Color Cards

Red = "Stop, I need help."

Green = "Keep going, I understand."

Yellow = "I'm a little confused."

49. Quickwrite
Without stopping, write what most confuses you.

50. Conference
A short, focused discussion between the teacher and student.

51. Debrief
Reflect immediately after an activity.

52. Exit Slip
Have students reflect on lessons learned during class.

53. Misconception Check
Given a common misconception about a topic, students explain why they agree or disagree with it.

Other Assessment Resources

In Edutopia's The Power of Comprehensive Assessment, Bob Lenz describes how to create a balanced assessment system.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) describes dozens of Formative Assessment Strategies.

The Assessment and Rubrics page of Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything website hosts many excellent assessment rubrics.

More Rubrics for Assessment are provided by the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

Jon Mueller's Authentic Tasks and Rubrics is a must see-resource in his Authentic Assessment Toolbox website.

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Dipsticks: Efficient Ways to Check for Understanding | Edutopia

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Alternative formative assessment (AFA) strategies can be as simple (and important) as checking the oil in your car -- hence the name "dipsticks." They're especially effective when students are given tactical feedback, immediately followed by time to practice the skill.

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Edutopia - 53 ways to check for understanding

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Edutopia - 53 ways to check for understanding

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Resources
Download these resources to use in your classroom.

PADLET seems to be a great web-based resource that can easily be implemented for Headlines and a variety of other thinking routines. Even though you may not have the technology in your classroom, this is a great way to have students extend their thinking in a collaborative manner outside the classroom.
- Sharla Lawshea, Media Specialist
Reuther Middle School

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The kids should be living K/W/L charts in the sense that they should be able to use the learned concepts and info. to describe how their thinking has changed throughout the learning process.

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After completing a "See, Think, Wonder" visible thinking routine about Health and Fitness, I experienced a class of students that were more interested and willing to learn during our resistance training unit. The students' level of enthusiasm/determination really seemed to increase as they made a connection with the benefits of weight lifting on personal fitness. Their willingness to engage in vigorous exercise was encouraging, and I really think that the visible thinking strategies that we incorporated really had an impact leading to this success. - Jason Schafer, Reuther P.E. Teacher

from ​https://www.edutopia.org/video/boosting-engagement-notices-and-wonders

Resources
Download these resources to use in your classroom.

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A routine that stimulates curiosity and inquiry through careful observations.

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﻿ ﻿ Children must be taught how to think, not what to think." - Margaret Mead ﻿ ﻿

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Abbie Driver WGRESA:  Found Poems
This strategy allows students to re-think a piece of literature--whether it is an actual poem or not--by breaking it down into its most important parts and rearranging those parts to make new meaning and new order. I like how this strategy brings in a creative element to the act of simply interpreting a text. Often more creative students zone out when we are summarizing a text, but the Found Poem would certainly engage them in a new way.

Mabry Blevins: "What Makes You Say That?"

We are constantly asking our students to  to make connections and prove their thinking but I have found over the years that some kids do not like to be questioned.  Instead of taking those questions as an opportunity to think differently, a lot of students assume they are wrong and either shut down or become defensive to argue their points.   My hope is that by including this thinking routine in regularly, my students will begin to ask themselves and others these questions as a way of pushing themselves to dig deeper.

I Used to Think But Now I Think

After spending a lot of quality time with "See, Think, Wonder", the next thinking routine I am planning to use is "I Used to Think but Now...."   The power of "I Used to Think" is that students use evidence to track their thinking as it develops. What do you know about the Great Depression, I ask to start a whole class discussion.  (If I use the timer, it's officially a 'retrieval learning' activity known as a brain dump.)  From the range of answers, we can focus on one or two such as the impact of the boll weevil. "I Used to Think" is particularly suited to hands-on work with primary sources in social studies.

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My second thinking routine is the Found Poem routine

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A routine to engage learners to construct meaning together

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Take personalized pictures of class content with photos from students’ world. For most material covered in class, there’s a connection to students’ lives or the world at large. Students are like your on-the-spot journalists for your class. Encourage them to take pictures of something that illustrates what you’re learning. Then display those images to their classmates. That’s a step toward student-driven learning.

4. Shoot a breaking news report with a video. Give students the reporter’s microphone and let them shoot a breaking news report — real or fictitious — about your content. Let them pretend they’re witnessing Custer’s Last Stand or the final scene in the novel you’re reading. It will encourage them to describe it accurately and dig into the details of what they’re learning.

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Teaching through the camera lens: 10 activities with photosand video 📹   

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Teaching through the camera lens: 10 activities with photosand video 📹   

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This post is sponsored by Samsung. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Once, it was so handy to carry one of those disposable film cameras around in our pockets.

Once, we were so thankful for our point-and-shoot digital cameras because they made instant photography so much easier.

Today, so many of us carry cameras around in our pockets. We pull them out at a moment's notice. Many of us have exponentially more photographic evidence of our lives than we ever did before.

(True story: My wife's decision to upgrade to an iPhone from a traditional, non-smart phone (a dumb phone?) was largely because of its camera!)

Students of all ages are carrying them around more and more. And with the proliferation of photo-based social media like Instagram and SnapChat, they're pros at sharing them.
Students have these phones with them at any given moment. They can share images and videos in an instant. Why not tap into that potential in the classroom?
Whether your classroom or school is 1:1 (a school-provided device for every student), has a "bring your own technology" policy or none of the above, many students have these high-powered devices in their pockets.

Photos and video are visually rich, personal ways to connect learning to our own lives.

This all sounds like a match made in "edtech" heaven.
Here are 10 ways you can get your students engaging with your class content with visuals using their cell phones:
1. Capture your year with the 1 Second Everyday app. This app encourages you to select one second of video for every day of the year. In the end, it creates a fascinating video year-in-review mash-up. It's a great cumulative look at how students have changed and a fun walk down memory lane.

2. Interview family, friends or community members with a video. There's a wealth of experiences, opinions and ideas locked in the minds of people in our own communities. Video interviews can set them free and let those thoughts resonate with others. An interview with a veteran on Veteran's Day will do so much more than a dry reading from a textbook.

3. Take personalized pictures of class content with photos from students' world. For most material covered in class, there's a connection to students' lives or the world at large. Students are like your on-the-spot journalists for your class. Encourage them to take pictures of something that illustrates what you're learning. Then display those images to their classmates. That's a step toward student-driven learning .

4. Shoot a breaking news report with a video. Give students the reporter's microphone and let them shoot a breaking news report - real or fictitious - about your content. Let them pretend they're witnessing Custer's Last Stand or the final scene in the novel you're reading. It will encourage them to describe it accurately and dig into the details of what they're learning.

5. Create stop-motion animation with an app and a mobile device camera. Stop-motion animation lets students take practically any concept they can conceive in their minds and display it in animated glory. Students can make meaning of the most abstract concepts - like the sodium potassium pump or mitosis - by creating an animated video. They can use apps like and .

6. Snap a picture of important notes from the board or a paper. If you've just finished a brainstorming session on the white board during class, consider letting students snap a picture of it. Call it the lazy way out, but they may be more apt to study that image on their phones than a page of notes. (Be sure to balance photos of the white board with hand-written notes, though. Brain research suggests huge benefits in taking notes by hand.)

7. Illustrate projects and other student work with self-created images. Sometimes, students need a picture of a basketball or a grapefruit or a certain toy. Instead of rushing off to Google Images to find one, why not have them shoot their own pictures? Having students use their own images is a way to respect others' intellectual property, a key part of digital citizenship .

8. Display growth with a photo each day. Want to see the change in the color of the leaves in a very tangible way? Or watch the progress of a growing plant or the setting sun? Have students take pictures each day and review the change later.

9. Use a time-lapse video to show change over time very quickly (or the reverse - slow motion). Time-lapse videos give a unique perspective into motion. They can show a filling gymnasium, a construction project or a Civil War reenactment in seconds. The converse - slow motion - has similar effects. Use a free app like Hyperlapse and to create time-lapse videos or a slow-motion app like Slow Motion Video FX .

10. Create animated GIFs. These fun, moving images are all over social media. They're short and can capture an idea in an instant. Plus, because they loop continuously, it lets us watch over and over and really absorb what's happening. will create an animated GIF automatically for students. Just shoot a burst of photos (or lots of quick photos in succession) and the Google Photos app will recognize it and create the image for you.

What if your students don't have smart phones? There are several ways to handle that:

See if they can borrow a friend or family member's phone to shoot photos or video and submit them to you.

Do a smart phone drive. Ask parents to donate old smartphones that still work that they won't use anymore. (Make sure to request the cord, too!) Students can check them out during the school day or to go home.

Does your school have a digital camera that students can check out? This could be an alternative to using a mobile device.

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Teaching through the camera lens: 10 activities with photos and video

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This post is sponsored by Samsung. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Once, it was so handy to carry one of those disposable film cameras around in our pockets. Once, we were so thankful for our point-and-shoot digital cameras because they made instant photography so much easier.