Matt's+First+Page

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=How to Teach with Technology: Social Studies = Bernard Sara. "How to Teach with Technology: Social Studies." Edutopia. (2009).

“How to Teach with Technology: Social Studies” is a great article that gives different strategies in using technology to teach in the classroom. Each strategy gives a detailed description of the activity the students are doing and how to integrate it with your lesson. The article gives seven different teaching methods to use technology to social studies. The strategies integrate writing and technology by having students write a blog about what they have read in the textbook. Another strategy used to integrate writing into social studies is creating a fake MySpace account as a historical figure from history that the students have been studying. These strategies allow for the students to be more creative and have fun while increasing their writing skills and content knowledge. This is a useful strategy because it teaches kids how to be more familiar with technology and better prepares them for future work in the technological era. Students will find this more interesting than reading n a textbook because this relates to their interests

=Writing to Learn in Social Studies = Tara L. Boyler. "Writing to Learn in Social Studies." Heldref Publication (2006).

“Writing to Learn in Social Studies” gives strategies in cooperating more writing techniques into the Social Studies curriculum. Tara L. Boyer discusses specifically using different form of poetry to help teach social studies. She believes that poetry is a creative process that allows the students to be freer in their work as well as learn the material. Boyer incorporates different forms of poetry such as haikus and acrostic poetry to teach the content while allowing students to be creative. Boyer also gives other examples of writing by creating a soldiers handbook during wartime, which promotes group work as well as writing strategies. Using poetry to teach history is an interesting strategy that promotes creativity and is not seen in many classrooms. This allows for students her work better on creative or group projects to promote their strengths. Writing in social studies is an important skill to teach because writing is used on state test as well as in other subject areas, such as English.

= Teaching Secondary English Learners to Understand, Analyze, and Write Interpretive Essays about Theme = Olson, C., Land, R., Anselmi, T. & AuBchon, C. (2010). [| Teaching Secondary English Learners to Understand, Analyze, and Write Interpretive Essays about Theme.] // Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54 // (4), 245-256.

The article discusses how students in a low income, urban area were put on a program known as the Path Way project. Through this the goal was to teach these students how to grasp a better understanding of theme since it was a difficult topic for the students. The program featured many different strategies that were more hands on and slowed down to help the students get a better understanding of theme. Teachers needed to develop confidence in the students due to their poor level of learning. Cognitive learning helped the students with more adult situation that they could relate to. The strategies mentioned in the article could be very useful for me because Social Studies and English share many of the same things that they much teach. Writing is a big part in both subject so the strategies they use like scolding would be very useful to me when I would teach about essay writing or looking for the main points in a DBQ.

=IS ROLE-PLAYING AN EFFECTIVE TEACHING METHOD?= Elizabeth Graves. "Is Role-Playing An Effective Teaching Method." http://www.cehs.ohio.edu/resources/documents/graves.pdf.

The article discusses how role playing can be an affective and fun teaching method for students in the classroom. This was done as a master degree experiment where the teacher spent 10 weeks dedicating her curriculum to role playing projects that got the students interactive while still learning the curriculum. Students thought that learning government was bring and not fun, but acting out a court case captured the students interest. The experiment showed that students learned the material efficiently and enjoyed doing so. This would be very effective for me to use in the classroom because students will be interested in the content and relies less on test grades, which I like. I would not do role playing for 10 weeks but I would have students act out a court case or a battle in World War I. = = Web 2.0