Kaulbach's Modern World

Overlying Questions for Modern World History These questions are the foundations for specific units but can be reviewed time and time again as the year progresses and knowledge of the world expands. How is our world connected?  (See National Geographic site ) Using National Standards of geo-literacy a geo-literate individual is able to reason about the ways that people and places are connect to each other across time and space. We should be able to: analyze digital and paper maps of a place or thematic topic and construct geographic questions to investigate issues. analyze current trends in population and constructing geographic questions to investigate the sources and future projections of the trends. analyze a current news report and construct questions that would provide a focus or resolution of the topic or issue. know what interactions and interconnections determine what outcomes of actions. When we integrate and evaluate of multiple sources of i...

Every year my husband and I try to bike sections of the bike trail system of Canada. 5,000 km of safe passage for bikes on gravel or paved roadways known in Quebec as La Route Verte. This year my 9 year old daughter wanted to ride this with friends. So we called it bike camp and invited 4 others to join us. In return, the other parents took our daughter on week long adventures. It was a great swap and it gave us an adventure as well. This is our 2nd year taking kids so we thought we would ramp up the mileage.  With another parent, a mini van and our Subaru, we had the opportunity to piece together the best and easiest sections of trail separate from regular traffic. It was a success! 4 days, 2 nights camping and one hotel, we looped from Waterloo to Noyan and crossed the Border in Alburg, Vermont. You can see that they finished happy. Their big request was to plant one foot in Canada and one foot in the US. And this granite post on the US side of the Border allows for this. ...

The infographics world is chock full of visuals that appeal to the teaching and understanding of world history.  From student submissions I can assess at a glance, their ability to contextualize comparisons between historic events or to identify patterns of change & continuity. Why is this important? Students of Advanced Placement World History (#WHAP) know that determining the meaning of words and phrases to present analysis is the difference between zero credit and that perfect score recognized by colleges worldwide. Misinterpretation of what is asked in the standard essay questions can translate into student writing at length to develop the wrong answer. 2011 AP Comparative Essay Question Analyze similarities and differences in the rise of TWO of the following empires. (Aztec, Mongol & or West African states) Hundreds of students made comparisons between Aztecs an Mongols but failed to explain how each empire  rose  to power thereby losing the t...

March 14th, 3.14, PI day is not just a celebratory day for math lovers, schools and rocket scientists. It can be a great day for the populace to gather over communal pie and discuss truly enlightening ideas. Due to weather and scheduling of events our school Pie/ PI celebration came early. Our public school volunteers actually call themselves P.I.E., Partners In Education. The director organizes businesses and parents to donate pies for the all day, all you can eat fund raiser. People come, they drink coffee, they jam on musical instruments, they chat about math and other things. A few of us spend the night prior to Pie/ PI day posting failures and successes on Facebook. The virtual gathering is fun. My mother never impaired me with pie making skills or secrets. Many friends are in the same situation, living far away from family. We post pictures, recipes, questions and jokes. We drink wine. This year we got creative.  I will never be able to match that apple pie made by the grandm...

Living in Vermont means making amends for educational productivity when a perfect snowstorm blankets the state. Students and teachers embrace the cold powder while it lasts. We ski, we snowboard, we play hard. No wonder that 16 Olympians are from Vermont.  At school we gained one actual snow day and then a week of residual effects as smiling, exhausted populations loped through the doors. Now we are on our winter break. Week 5 merged into week 6 of my experience with a 1:1 iPad rollout but not without sound accomplishment. Smart Technology- Students no longer groan when I request their weekly download of additional apps. I offhandedly created a metaphor to explain I need them to access a variety of apps.  Imagine   the iPad as a "dumb" robot. Each application that we add to it gives it a function like a brain. We are the masters building the brain of this device. Instead of playing games, we need to control the games, control the applications. We make it a "smart...

Did you know that  it was Digital Learning Day nationwide?  PBS offered a fantastic opportunity to connect educators.  I stepped up my enthusiasm for digital learning by telling students to SMASH APPS! and tweeted class totals (#dlday).  Smashing immediately connotes images of destruction but according to my twitter community it simply means using more than one app to create something digital.  My students had opportunities to using sketching apps with text apps, work flow apps with platform apps and as an added incentive, would be allowed to use class time for gaming or bonus points on past assessment scores. Guess which incentive won out? Our school launched our Follow Your Dreams project during DLD week. Every week a senior or alumni of has the opportunity to present their work towards a dream, TED Talk style in our library media center.  During a 20 minute advisory time students voluntarily choose to attend a variety of club activities, conferences ...

Just a quick push for some blog favorites. I'm so busy watching the Olympics and tweeting at the same time, I really can't focus on anything else!  Vermont has a number of athletes attending and several of them are from my area in the northern region. Even better, I coached and hovered behind coaches who worked with these athletes since they were in elementary school. I basically grew up, learning to be a better educator because of these kids and my fellow coaches.  This is a blog by my husband and 1998 Olympian, Marc Gilberston. His focus is still on skiing. He is currently racing in the Canadian Ski Marathon. But he also makes time to meet with a colleague and librarian each week to help our school keep a heads up on tech changes. Check out:  Weekly Geek http://youtu.be/w-RinB0KTrY This girl started as a fantastic high school runner but quickly became much more. She went to Burke Academy, was coached by Matt Whitcomb and they went on in ski racing. He is ...

Week 2 of my focus on technology.  "Chilly" in Vermont means starting each day with -20 temperatures. Head colds are circulating through the school and a surprise Lock Down drill happened right in the middle of a well planned lesson.  No worries.  My students huddled into a dark corner of my classroom during the lockdown with their iPads in absolute quiet.  Each student was gaming or texting like crazy. I took a selfie and forwarded it to the principal. Last week I introduced lessons to accommodate  Luddites and iPad enthusiasts and this week was dedicated to keeping routines. I really need the transition towards technology to be smooth or learning will be set aside for entertainment value only. Notability is my go to workflow application for downloading and editing class notes. Each day, students followed the same work flow using various templates that I designed or chose- vocabulary organizers, CLOZE activities and reading comprehension charts. In Notability...

Week 1- experiment Week 2- establish workflow Week 3-create  The transition to a 1:1 digital classroom has become a means for lessons designed around common goals and outcomes set by both students and teachers. Cram cards are a strategy for organization and are just one example of a classroom practice that digital technology can't replace. Students requested an opportunity to create a cram card for the midterms so I saved the remnants of some; it fascinates me to look at the details and differences all have with one goal in common.  Each card above is an individual work, not copied, not shared representing the needs and abilities of each learner.  By responding to student requests for cram cards I saw how effort and review help assuage exam anxieties.   Student evaluation does not necessarily have to happen only in a digital classroom.  But an evaluation application that yields instant compilation of answers makes response immediate and therefore...

It is risky business, changing everything you teach and control in order to move towards a tech heavy classroom. I am one week into a 1:1 iPad rollout for all of the juniors and seniors at our rural highschool as the last assigned group of a schoolwide transition to 1:1 iPads that began in August. I went through the training, observed middle school and freshmen/ sophmore educators pioneer implementation and developed some tech savvy along the way. While I still have much to learn, I feel confident sharing a few tips Get psyched about technology even if you are a Luddite.  Instead of eyeing students suspiciously and working on punishments for misuse of devices develop incentives to use them.   We don't want a culture of learning based on worries about breakage and imposed controls.  No one means of learning should be soley relied upon in education.  On top of this, some of my juniors have taken an anti disestablishment position in regards to worries of a scho...