Getting ready for the new school year!

I wanted to create this last year when my wife created hers, but I was just too busy. One of the most interesting projects I was a part of last year involved the Arsenault family here in Maine and their loved one, George Arsenault who was killed in World War Two. We travelled to France with John Hirsch's French classes and visited the Cemetery to culminate our project. In the upper right hand corner of my blog is a link to the news story that covered our project.

August is the time of year when my brain spins with new possibilities!

This year I am excited to be teaching a Psychology class for the first time. Luckily I don't have to do it until 2nd semester so I have plenty of time to prepare. Psychology is an elective class for Juniors and Seniors.

I am really excited this year about our school's investment in technology. My students will all have iPads. This means I can create content in iTunes U Course Manager and send out books to my students using iBooks Author loaded with content. It also means my students can use iMovie and I'm already working on a project to try and get funding for a high quality camcorder to use in my classroom so my students can create high quality movies. This project will be for my History v. Hollywood class. This is an elective class for Juniors and Seniors in which we study the power of film to teach history. My project is here:

http://www.donorschoose.org/project/budding-filmmakers/1039419

Feel free to share it! The more share sit gets, the more likely I am to find a donor!

I am also teaching Ethics again this year. Ethics is also an elective class for Juniors and Seniors. My favorite part about this class is discussing with students the real world application of these ideas.

 

I am also prepping and updating the class I teach online through Virtual High School.  This class is called US Foreign Policy 1945-Present. The class is completely online and students from all over the country take it. Because I teach this, 25 students at my school can choose to take any online class form the VHS course catalog. In the class I teach, we utilize simulations from the last 50 years from the Choices program at Brown University. Students post discussions and assignments online and make use of Wiki's for collaborative projects.

The last 2 classes I teach are Honors U.S. History and Advanced Placement U.S. History to Juniors. In these courses we cover a survey of U.S. History from early European contact with Native Americans to as close to the present as possible. It's very hard! The AP curriculum is prescribed and requires a lot of reading from the students. I have more freedom in the Honors course and incorporate many more simulations into this course. I love to do role-play and gaming simulations in these classes and I often hear that students like it too.

I plan to use this blog to document my school year and the things I am doing so that I have an ongoing record of what I have tried and how it went! I also thought it would be nice to share with others and maybe learn some things as a result. Feel free to post questions and comments if you desire!