After talking to a colleague during common planning time, I learned about a new webpage to create charts.  After playing with it for a while I created a concept definition map.  

  

Not bad for a first attempt!

I am exhausted.  We had parent teacher conferences last night.  It was a great night.  My team had many parents come in to discuss the progress of their students.  The flip side is that the school day was longer (it ended at 8:00PM) yesterday, which meant today dragged.  That being said, I felt really proud of the accomplishments of my students today.  We have been working on summarizing our Social Studies notes.  I feel that the students are making a lot of progress.  The seventh graders summarized information about Assyria and Babylonia and the eighth graders summarized information on the First Continental Congress.  The few that I have read are decent.


On another note, since I have not turned off my teacher brain, I was looking around for information to teach the Constitution.  I am not quite there yet in the curriculum, but I want to be prepared.  I found the following video on 
the Gilder Lehrman website.

On Friday in class, I checked out the ipad cart from the school library to use in my classes for the day.  My 8th grade classes had an assignment to create a "Fakebook" page on either George Washington or King George III using www.classtools.net .  I thought it was a lot of fun.  For my seventh grade classes I thought I would try a new activity that I had never done before, but heard other teachers in the building have used the site.  It was www.polleverywhere.com .  They idea was to pose a survey(poll) question and using the tablets the students would respond and we could look at their answers as they were projected on to the smart board.  I used questions from the text we were reading.  After some minor glitches, I was able to get it to work for the first class.  I was excited to try it with the second class.  Unfortunately, one of the students posted an inappropriate response and that was the end of that activity.  Down below is a sample of my "Fakebook" example for my students.