Feudalism is another one of those concepts that can be entertainingly and deliciously demonstrated in a classroom setting by having students play the roles of the different social stations in the pyramid and making candy representative of the rights and obligations due between lords and vassals. The teacher provides a running narrative of how feudalism works throughout this activity, making it a very interactive lecture.
Many of my students do MUN; I myself attended the IASAS MUN Conference in 2000 as the Russian delegate. This simulation is inspired by such negotiation- and speech-based events. Students are divided into groups and essentially debate the relative merits of the respective civilizations.
When planes crash, investigators sift through the wreckage to find the “black box” flight recorder. It tells them what went wrong – was there an equipment malfunction? Pilot error? Bird strikes? They use that data to try and prevent future problems.
Summative assessment, in education parlance, is like an airplane’s black box. It comes at the end of a unit, and it might be a test, essay, presentation, or something else. A teacher grading it can tell what “went wrong” with a student’s learning from the type of mistakes he makes. And he can use that information to inform future teaching. But it would be much preferable if we could prevent students from crashing and burning during tests in the first place.
That’s where formative assessment comes into play – those checks for understanding that take place throughout a unit and help a teacher correct misunderstandings and clarify important concepts before big events. iClickers are a new-ish way of generating hard data, interactively, on student understanding.
Continue reading Showcase: iClickers
Ancient World History isn’t that conceptual aside from basic government types and religious dogmas, so when we do get an interesting concept like the Chinese Mandate of Heaven I try to create what my common planning colleague calls a “memorable learning experience.” This activity hones students’ public speaking and persuasive skills while helping them to understand a novel political mechanism from classical Chinese civilization.
History isn’t the most dynamic of fields. Compared to, say, an English or Science class, the content we teach rarely evolves. To make the class engaging, then, I search for new ways to make students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate what we learn. In the “famous figures Facebook” assignment, students create a social networking profile for a historical figure.
Kuwait is expensive, so I use my summers to stock up on all the gear that I can’t get cheaply and/or easily abroad. Also, buying from Amazon and Newegg is cheaper and easier than brick ‘n’ mortar retailers. This summer I’ve made two purchases that I’d say are staple technology upgrades:
1. In-ear monitors (IEMs) – noise-isolating earphones 
I travel frequently – 3-4 times per semester for conferences, long weekends, breaks, and swim meets. The drone of airplane engines makes it tough to listen to movies and music, though. Many travellers swear by noise-cancelling headphones: older audiences like Bose Quietcomforts, while Beats by Dr. Dre are the unchallenged favorites among my students. I was seriously considering getting a pair of JVCs or Panasonics, which both are in the $100 range, but after reading the comments on David Pogue’s piece, I decided that a pair of IEMs – which sit inside your ear canal and effectively act like earplugs – had the triple advantages of not requiring batteries, isolating a wider frequency of noises, and being significantly smaller than headphones. Also, I can use them outside on a summer day without my ears getting terribly sweaty.
I considered IEMs from Etymotics, Ultimate Ears, Klipsch, and Shure. Customer reviews on Amazon revealed the following:
So on my trip to NYC last weekend, I picked up a pair of Shure SE215s from B&H Photo (which I consider to be a tourist attraction in and of itself, on top of their oustanding selection and prices competitive with Amazon). I’m not sure why I chose them over the Klipsch S4s – they’re $30 more expensive – but I’m really happy with them so far. They have a novel approach in which the wires go up, over, and behind your ear rather than falling straight down like the Klipsches. The foam earbuds really block out noise, much to my girlfriend’s annoyance when she’s trying to get my attention. And the sound is clear, crisp, and has ample bass. The cable is also really sturdy, and is actually user-replaceable so you don’t need to buy a whole new set of phones if the wire goes bad. My only complaint: unlike my previous pair of Sony IEMs, the cable goes in front of your neck, not behind it. I always liked Sony’s behind-the-neck design, because you could hang your earphones around your neck when they weren’t in your ear.
2. SSD
My Macbook is nearing three years old, and it’s getting poky for current software, even after an emergency reformat last month. I didn’t want to shell out $1000 for a new Air, but I did want to bump the performance. My biggest issue was that application lauching took a long time, even with my 7200rpm 500GB internal drive. Running Win 7 in VMWare Fusion was especially slow. I’d read the buzz about how buying an SSD is the single best upgrade you can make, but to purchase a 500GB SSD would cost upwards of $500 – half the cost of a new machine. Luckily, my Macbook has a little-used DVD drive that you can (with elbow grease and no fear of voiding the warranty) replace with a second hard drive. So I purchased a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD – more than enough to hold my OS and Applications – and OWC’s Data Doubler bracket to fit it into my Macbook’s DVD slot. Now my OS, Apps, and virtual machines sit on the SSD (about 80GB total), and my 250GB of movies, music, pictures, and documents sit on my 500GB drive.
How fast is it? You can look up benchmarks on the web, but I’ll admit that I have spent time opening different applications just to see them open in one bounce of the dock icon.
Very nice.