I used the app iTunes u to find several resources I can use as a teacher. Once I got this app, I opened it up and clicked on the icon “educators”.

 

Once I clicked this, I was sent to a different page which provided me different sections to be explored like inspiring lesson ideas, using apps in the classroom, teaching with iPad, etc. For this assignment I looked through the inspiring lesson ideas. This provided me with 30 diverse courses I could subscribe to! I was particularly interested in three courses: It’s All Geography to Me, Building Self-Advocacy, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  I was surprised at how many of these courses I could use in my own classroom for social studies. When you subscribe to a course it provides you with videos, books, documents, apps, images, materials, and web links to use for the course. These courses are a great resource to implement in the classroom regardless the subject.

 

 

I chose the course It’s All Geography to Me to subscribe to. This course was specific to teaching geography for the first time to seventh and eighth graders. The instructor of the course, Mr. Keith Heggart,  does not solely use direct instruction but encourages active engagement with the content the students are learning. Isaac Pineda, author of the One Best Thing iBook “Student Authored Textbooks: A Student’s Perspective on History“, promotes this type of teaching strategy. He states, “By allowing the students to engage in active learning it gave them the power to research, question, and investigate. It gives them ownership and allows them to engage in inquiry-based learning.”

The home page of the course provides an overview of the course, instructor information, outline of the course, pedagogical philosophy, about the ADE Program, and about lessons for the classrooms. Understanding and implementing this course in my classroom would be easy and perfect for my philosophy for teaching! Geography can sometimes be a hard subject for middle schoolers. I would use lesson ideas from this course by giving my students the opportunity to create their own field report of areas I have assigned to them. This would give them the ownership of choosing what they want to study and create an individual motivation to learn.  This course is a great resource that gives me various ideas to utilize in my classroom!