I’m teaching Social Studies again this year. Grade 8 Social Studies. My curriculum is…world history. Pretty much none of it is off the table. As a fan of history, this is great. I started the year by running a Classroom Story where students create and run their own city-states/islands. We learned about some of the terminology…
From mid-2017 until recently, I feel like I developed a bad habit: I was proverbially throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I rejected the good things within a larger body because I didn’t like some of the elements. What did I throw away? My involvement online. The news made me mad, social media seemed…
people learn when they're engaged and mentored. Not when they're info-dumped and left hanging
I started this series earlier last year (Part 1 & Part 2), examining how video games have become one of our culture’s favourite types of text. But this series is not just about video games. It’s about how the benefits of games can crossover into education. This series stems from my fascination with how people…
Read more Dichotomy in the Classroom: Teaching a Gaming Generation (Part 3)
As with most things in our classroom, it started with a story. In our Classroom Story, “Carta Marina”, we had a portion called Dungeon Dash where students’ characters were navigating a dungeon looking for monsters, loot, and keys. One group encountered a Slime, the most basic, weak, and ubiquitous of the Fantasy Role-Playing Game enemies/monsters. Below is the…
I used to draw. Then I was a recovering drawer. And after participating in Inktober, I realized I am a drawer once again. Inktober was an initiative started by artist Jake Parker. The challenge is to do a pen and ink drawing every day for the month of October and is meant to “to improve inking skills and develop…
Schmidt's Class 