Yesterday in class we took some time to discuss the New Madrid Fault Line that is located in northeast Arkansas and southeast Missouri. This fault line is still active and it is thought that back in the early 1800′s the line produced an earthquake of an 8.0 magnitude. In order to show my students the seismic activity in this region I introduced them to the USGS site that measures such activity all over the world. The site is a great tool for anyone that is teaching science, but it also adequately fits the need for this lesson.

Mr. McClung

For the past few days we have been using an excellent website in class as a resource for our Arkansas City Project. We have been using a site called Encyclopedia of Arkansas, this site offers up a wide variety of information and resources that are useful to any Arkansas history teacher. You can visit the site by clicking here.

Mr. McClung

On Monday we started our week by reviewing our notes from last week about the Isms. This term refers to the different political ideas and theories that exist in the world. Students were given 7 different pictures that were hung all over the classroom and they were asked to identify the what term the picture was referring to.

After students identified what the image was meant to represent, they were then asked to provide evidence as to support their choice. This provided for some great conversations in class and gave students some good visual representations to attach to the terms that we have already learned.

Mr. McClung

Yesterday in class we took a look at North Korea’s communist government did so by listening to a podcast from NPR. This is a method that I use in my teaching from time to time, but it was a first for this group of students. After we finished the lesson I decided to gauge how much my students actually enjoyed the lesson.

The graphs above are from my three social studies class and represent their enjoyment and the amount of learning they experienced during class. The vertical axis represents learning and the horizontal axis represents enjoyment. As you can see the charts vary, but this is an awesome way for me as a teacher to gain some quick and easy feedback from my students over the lesson that was just taught.

Mr. McClung

As apart of our remembrance of the attacks on 9/11/01, today in class we will be using an interactive media site from the History Channel that shows amazing home footage from the attacks that day. The name of the website is 102 Minutes that Changed America, it the site does a wonderful job of capturing what it was like to be apart of the events that took place that day.

Mr. McClung

Students, today we will begin our 9/11 research project as apart of our school wide remembrance of the attacks on September 11th, 2001. Students will be given a list of 4-5 names of people that died on that day and will be asked to research basic information about those individuals using the Remember website.

Remember September 11th, 2001 Link

Mr. McClung

In class today we took a look at an interactive map from CNN that displays the US casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. We used this map as a part of our discussion of the war on terror being the longest US military conflict in history.

Mr. McClung

Today in class we took a closer look at GDP and how it relates to our national debt in the United States. In class we used a debt clock website as an impressive visual of what exactly our debt looks like and where our money is going. You can check out this debt clock by clicking here.

Mr. McClung

Today I will be leading a professional development session at my school over how to use and implement an Edublogs website into your classroom. Listed below are a few of the links that we will be using today to show good examples of blogging and the various ways that it can be used.

• Mr. Lamshed’s Class – South Adelaide, Australia
• Jarrod is a teacher of a year 6/7 teacher at an all boys school. Great use of video and displays creativity of his students. Jarrod’s website is a more traditional educational blog and uses a structure that is common in educational blogging.
• Jenny B. Jones – Bentonville, AR
• Jenny is a high school teacher and an author and uses her blog to write about her adventures as both…and does so in a amusing manner. Her website is more of a personal use blog than an educational blog, but still offers some great examples of blogging.
• Free Tech for Teachers – South Paris, ME
• Richard Bryne is a high school civics and history teacher who uses his blog to share free technology resources for teachers.

Keep in mind there are tons of other great blogs that I would love to show you, but unfortunately our school filter limits our access to those at school. Feel free to check out the blogroll located on the right hand side of the page.

Mr. McClung

Yesterday my students were given a homework assignment to read up on the 36th governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus. Students were asked to read the given article and prepare a index card that has two components…on one they were asked to write any interesting facts that they found in the article and the other side they were asked to write their reaction to the article about Faubus.

Today in class we took those note cards and students were placed into groups of four and participated in a discussion activity called ‘save the last word’…here are the guidelines to this discussion.

• Students take turns reading their interesting facts on their cards to the rest of the group…this serves as a conversation starter.
• After everyone has chimed in with their thoughts on the fact presented to the first student, that student then reads their reaction to the article and therefore gets the last word…this continues to everyone has gone.

This activity did work very well and students were able to use it with success in starting meaningful conversation about who Faubus was as a person and a politician.

Mr. McClung

My example of Q Notes taken from a screen shot of my Interwrite Workspace.

In an effort to try something new in our history class, today I will be introducing Q-notes to my students. Q-notes is a two column note taking system that is very easy to use and helps simplify the note taking process. In the left hand column students are asked to record their cues or questions…basically they will be taking headings or subheadings from their books and forming questions from those headings and placing them in this column. In the right hand column students will record their description or answer that matches their cue.

Today we used the section of our book that deals with McCarthyism and politics of Arkansas post WWII…and of course, as with any new technique I introduce to my students, I wanted to gain some feed back from them as to how useful this note taking style was.

The vertical axis represents how much my students enjoyed this style and the horizontal axis represents how much they learned using this style. Students were asked to mark where they fell on the chart as they left the classroom. As you can see there was mixed results from this experiment that I used today…while many students seemed to enjoy this method of notes, there were those that didn’t care for the style of notes. Tomorrow in class we will take some time to discuss what the positives and negatives were of this style.

Mr. McClung

Today in class we will be starting a new project in which we will take a look at the stock market and actually hold our own mock stock market in our classroom…in order to accomplish this task we will need to use the CNN Money website to research stock. You will be using the suggested stocks that I give you in class, also listed below, and research the stocks and find 3-5 companies that you are interested in investing in.

• AAPL Apple Inc
• AMZN Amazon.com Inc
• ATVI Activision Blizzard Inc
• C Citigroup Inc
• CMCSA Comcast Corp
• CSCO Cisco Systems Inc
• DDS DillardS Inc
• DELL Dell Inc
• DIS Walt Disney Co
• EBAY eBay Inc
• FFBHD First Federal Bancshares of Ar
• FOSL Fossil Inc
• GOOG Google Inc
• GPS Gap Inc
• INTC Intel Corp
• JBHT J B Hunt Transport Services In
• JNJ Johnson & Johnson
• MCD McDonalds Corp
• MSFT Microsoft Corp
• NFLX Netflix Inc
• ORCL Oracle Corp
• PCLN Priceline.com Inc
• SIRI Sirius XM Radio Inc
• TSN Tyson Foods Inc
• WMT Wal-Mart Stores Inc
• YHOO Yahoo! Inc
• SNE Sony Corp

Once we have selected 3-5 companies you will be given $1,000 to invest in these companies how every you wish…you may also save some money and choose not to invest all your money with the opportunity to buy or sell in later days to come. So go ahead and start your greed…the Wall Street will be the name of the game for the next 10 days.

Note – students, you can also use the NASDAQ website to view trends of companies as well.

Mr. McClung

Today in class we will be using an interactive map that is produced by PBS that discusses the banishment of African Americans starting in the post-civil war era and the effect that it has had on our current population today. To visit the website click here.

Mr. McClung

Today in class we used a graphic organizer strategy called “rock around the clock” to take notes for our new section over reconstruction in Arkansas. This organizer can be seen above and features several boxes in which students record information. They are asked to identify the main idea, key terms, important points, ah-ha moments, and any questions. The idea behind this organizer is for students to move past the decoding of text and actually read the text for meaning.

With today being the first time I have tried to use this organizer in class, I wanted to receive feedback from my students on what they thought of it. The picture above shows four charts that were taken from my history classes. Students were asked to compare the organizer to the notes we normally take in class…and criteria was focused on how much they enjoyed it (vertical axis) and how much they learned (horizontal axis) when compared to the other style of notes.

Mr. McClung

In class today my students took the 1965 Alabama literacy test for voting. At the time of taking the test my students were not aware that what they were taking was a literacy test for voting but after they found out they were very surprised to find out that people were subjected to such a test to simply vote. The slide show is the 10 question sample test that my students took today…how smart are you?

Mr. McClung

Today in class we will be using a teaching resource from PBS that documents the rise and fall of Jim Crow. We will be using the website to examine the barriers that African Americans faced during this time period of segregation and oppression. The site provides plenty of activities and lesson plans for teachers as well as videos and other resources. Today we will be using the site to take a voters literacy test as well as look at exactly how hard it was to vote if you were African American.

Mr. McClung

On Friday I introduced to my students a new project which requires them to research a supreme court case that had an impact on Jim Crow laws. As an exit activity on Friday, I requested some feedback from my students as to how effective the activity was…we measured this activity by looking at enjoyment and learning. I drew a chart on my board that included a vertical axis representing how much they enjoy the new Jim Crow Project and the horizontal axis represented how my they were actually learning from this project…and what we were left with was a pretty nice looking scatter chart. Students were asked to leave a “X” or some other type of representation on the chart to gauge where their excitement and learning fit in. While the chart itself is not very impressive it does provide great information for me as a teacher because it gives me an opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of the lesson. The data on the chart is also a more honest representation of what the students truly feel about the lesson because it is not a forced response and it is anonymous.

Mr. McClung

Keeping with the theme of this week we will be using another Kagan Learning Strategy to review our class notes before we begin our class lesson today. Today we will be using an activity called Circle the Sage in order to review the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Here’s how it works…

• First the teacher identifies students that are the answers/concepts behind the content being presented…for my class we will be using 6 students.
• These students are then assigned to a group of 2-4 students and teacher their information to the entire group.
• After each sage is finished, everything then returns to their seats and people that were not selected as a sage are asked to explain the content to the class.

The idea with this activity is to use experts to explain to students in a small group setting. Not only does it create a small group setting, but it allows students to use their peers as a source of information.

Mr. McClung

Today in class we used a Kagan Learning Strategy in order to review the content covered from the previous day. The name of the game is numbered heads together, and in this game students are randomly selected to answer review questions for their group…here are the rules.

• Each group is given a whiteboard and marker
• Groups are divided into four and students then number off
• Teacher will call of certain numbers to answer a question
• If a students number is called, they then write the answer on their whiteboard to show to the teacher
• Students are not allowed to conference with other teammates unless they have exceeded the time limit

One aspect of this review that I really like is that it helps me as a teacher get out of the slump of calling on the same kid over and over again for answers to a class review…all the while, everyone else in the class is disinterested in the lesson. In this game each student knows that their number is likely to be called and know that they will be held accountable for producing a answer.

Mr. McClung

This past week my students learned how to take notes using Frayer Model graphic organizers. The Frayer Model is a vocabulary building organizer that requires students to define a term, give examples, draw a picture, and give non-examples. This is an excellent way to build vocabulary and retain the taught content. The example above is from my class this week as we used Frayer Models to help explain the major events of the scientific revolution.

Mr. McClung