This school year we tried something new, or like a series of something new. While I work with a PLC to plan and reflect, I am normally the ones who brings our ideas to a tangible fruition because I can envision how to make things a digital reality.
DIGITAL NOTEBOOK
This was the biggest undertaking of the summer. We created a digital notebook with a tab and note templates for each civilization we planned on studying this year. The original digital notebook came from SlidesMania (on of my favorite free tools). We found resources with a GRAPES (geography, religion, accomplishments, politics, economics, and social structure) acronym for studying and organizing aspects of digital civilizations. We decided that our E was going to be Events instead of Economics – which is sometimes hard for 7th graders to grasp. The notebook also had a page for each civilization with the Key Terms and links to additional resources to help students.
Worked Well: It was consistent and predictable for students. Everything was linked in one place, luckily the Newsela Text Set and Quizlet vocabulary decks could be updated without having to change the link in the notebook. By using the GoogleSheets Doctopus Add-On I was able to distribute copies of the GoogleSlides Notebook to every student on my roster and track their edits. The digital notebook made us seem very organized.
Needs Improvement: If we wanted to modify the Key Terms or the content we focused on, it was already distributed to students. It was a mild annoyance for the regular version, but it was a bigger issue for the modified learning support version. It was the first time we were teaching the Indus Valley, Ancient China, Mesoamerica, and African Kingdoms. It was also the first time we used GRAPES for all of the civilizations, so it makes sense there were gaps in what we anticipated teaching over the summer compared to what we actually taught. Some students also struggled with having so much virtual work, so after the first few civilizations I created a paper one pager for GRAPES that I printed as an option. There were so many slides in the digital notebook that it was slow to load, next year I will suggest splitting it into 2 smaller (but still massive) notebooks.
NEW CIVILIZATIONS
We wanted to represent a greater percent of our students, so we added the Indus Valley, Ancient China, Mesoamerica, and the Bantu Migrations.
Worked Well: We found and/or created some great activities that engaged the students: they really enjoyed coloring mandalas, solving the BreakoutEDUs, discussions about the Olmec and Maya using Nearpod, playing pok-a-tok, and learning languages on Duolingo. The civilizations we added enhanced the ones we already taught by having both similarities and differences.
Needs Improvement: We were just in the brainstorm and develop resource phase of the Bantu when we realized a critical flaw. They were a linguistic group, shaped by a major shared event, but they were not a cohesive civilization. If the pandemic taught us anything, it was how to gracefully pivot and procrastinate while problem-solving. We shifted ‘Bantu’ until after Ancient Rome and rebranded it African Kingdoms (Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Aksum), which is accurate with the Roman Empire timeline. The student digital notebook will need a complete facelift, but I’m much happier with the content we are developing. Right now the Newsela Text Set has been updated with the new focus. TBD what the finalized lesson set will look like.
REVIEW ACTIVITY
We wanted to have a review and open note test after the first half of the civilizations. I wanted it to be more effective than students randomly guessing on Kahoot, Quizizz, or Blooket (all of which students like and have a place, just not for this purpose). I saw an idea on Twitter the year before and realized it had potential for our study of Ancient Civilizations
Worked Well: Students color coded the boxes based on the civilization, then used their notes to find the answers. Students worked hard over two class periods. Their notes were on GoogleSlides, so this was one of a handful of things printed for students to complete on paper. The following day was an open note, mid-civilization test they were allowed to use the grid on. There was a strong correlation between the students who completed (or nearly completed) the grid and those who did well on the test.
Needs Improvement: The inverse was also true. If students struggled to complete the review grid, their test scores were poor. They did not have the awareness or motivation to realize what they didn’t know for the review should be figured out before the test. There is also limited space to write questions and answers, which limits what you can ask. We did feel it was enough of a positive to create another one for the 2nd set of civilizations – questions still need to be added for the African Kingdoms.
SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT ACTIVITY
After spending half a school year on various Ancient Civilizations, we needed some sort of summative assessment activity. There is no works well/needs improvement because they have not been attempted yet. This pre-reflection is working through the logistics of what it would look like.
My first choice was an essay, but due to some complicated logistical issues, it wasn’t possible right now. Of course, I didn’t figure this out until I had already created an essay organizer with questions to ponder to develop a claim statement and sentence starters for different parts of the essay. I still like the idea of students picking three different civilizations to compare/contrast in a five paragraph essay. I even purchased a resource on Teachers Pay Teachers by Instructomania with Mr and Mrs P that had some practices with finding evidence to support demo claims about different Ancient Civilizations. I wasn’t going to use it fully, but it was a good introduction to historical essays. Saving all of these ideas and resources for next year; hopefully a more normal year.
On Twitter I saw another idea that blossomed into a summative assessment: hexagonal thinking.
I was intrigued so I searched for more information; I saw a bunch of teacher blog posts, and liked the examples and visuals from the Cult of Pedagogy Hexagonal Thinking: A Colorful Tool for Discussion. I was sold. So I used the same digital notebook with color tabs that students have. The colors of hexagonal tile matches each civilization we have studied. There are also some general grey ones with overarching topics to build off of. This is still a work in progress, but at 80% done, I love it. We still have to add the key terms for the African Kingdoms. I also want to debrief and reflect with the other teachers in my PLC to see if there are any terms we want to add, change, or delete. After creating my own web, I realized my initial target number of terms was too high for the space they had available.
Before having them do a full version individually, I want to hear the discussions they have with a specially curated set of hexagonal tiles. For the group discussion/collaborative version, I’m going to print it out on card stock. Each group will need to cut out their own and label which civilization goes with the phrase. There will be many similar tiles, but will be limited to a set, of which they need to include every single term. I like the idea of having a GoogleSlide presentation where every group inserts their finished product so they can explain to the class the choices they made. I realize that for hexagonal thinking to be the more efficient, it needs perfect terms. The paper copy is going to need more brainstorming to come up with the perfect list of terms.
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