Guest Blogger: Todd LaVogue’s Award Winning Project
September 28, 2012
Roosevelt Middle School educator Todd LaVogue recently received the first-place Educators Choice Award for his project “What’s Up Egypt?” during Microsoft’s Partners in Learning U.S. Forum. LaVogue is one of 16 U.S. educators who will attend the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum in Prague, Czech Republic, in November. My name is Todd LaVogue. For the past three years I taught sixth and eighth grade history at Roosevelt Middle School in West Palm Beach, Florida. I enter each unit of study with the idea of taking something the students know and enjoy and combining it with the material mandated by the state that should be taught during the unit. My students, in turn, create television shows, plays, public service announcements and music videos within our unit of study. In one of our more recent projects, my students researched and created an ancient Egypt Today show-style news program with news, weather, sports, cooking, lifestyle, historical and music segments. For example, the weather segment discussed the annual flooding of the Nile and how that was essential to life in ancient Egypt through the depositing of silt on the banks, fertilizing crops. We accomplished this by infusing technology into the curriculum. Using a… Read the Rest»
