Over the past two weeks, I have been working with a team of outstanding high school social studies teachers, including Mr. Hussein Beydoun, Mr. Marc Golles, Mr. William Harrison, Mr. Pete Kotsogiannis, Mrs. Katie Meyers, Mr. Jamie Nack, Ms. Fatmeh Rida, and Mrs. Colleen Schumm to create a comprehensive review course on Moodle (iLearn) for the High School Social Studies M-Step. The result of these teachers’ hard work is an incredible model of what is possible when teachers integrate technology into student learning environments.
There are 67 standards upon which the High School Social Studies M-Step is based.
For each of these standards, the contributing teachers created a practice quiz. Each quiz…
- is introduced with a textual summary of the content related to the standard
- has at least one video summary of the content that students can watch before taking the quiz
- has an embedded set of Quizlet flashcards with important terms related to the standard
A preview of the quiz-taking experience.
- contains a random selection of 5 questions from a question bank of up to 30 questions that were compiled by the content experts
- allows students to check their answers and immediately see the correct answer for the question, allowing for timely feedback
- allows students to re-take the quiz as many times as they wish with a different random selection of questions
- is only marked “complete” when students achieve at least 80% correct on one attempt of the quiz (think accountability)
- contains auto-linked content or academic vocabulary upon which students can click to see a definition, diagram, map, or picture as they review.
This course has many obvious benefits for students and teachers:
- Students interact with the material as opposed to simply seeing a few main concepts again.
- The course is student-paced.
- Everything is done; teachers simply need to set the expectations for students. They can choose to give time during class or assign the work for homework. This also frees teachers up to work with individual or small groups of students on specific topics on which they need the most help.
- Students can self-assess and teachers can quickly and easily monitor student progress on individual quizzes, and on the course as a whole.
- Teachers can use data from student work to give more focused intervention on topics in which they are most deficient.
- The course has an infinite lifespan–it’s ready to go for years to come and can be updated and improved from year to year.
- All of the materials in this course can be easily imported into each teacher’s own Moodle (iLearn) course if they wish.
To help teachers and students get started, the team is working to establish a one-page instruction document to distribute: