Kevin Brookhouser

Last year, in an attempt to open our minds to what a 20% Project could be, we took part in The Bad Idea Factory. Here's the original post . Since then, I 've been sharing TBIF with other teachers, and others have found it to be a useful activity including Karl Lindgren-Streicher . This week was TBIF week for York 10th graders again. Here is a sample of some of their worst ideas.

brookhouser . me/news Shownotes ! As I mentioned earlier , each week some friends and I get together to produce a YouTube show using Google+ Hangouts On Air called The Google Educast . Here's an example of the final product. Now with a Google+ and YouTube account, students can create a news broadcast show for the world to watch. Here are some instructions on how to pull it off on your own. The instructions in this post may become outdated as the technology changes. I'll try to keep them current with crowdsourced help here. Please comment in the doc. With Google Docs and Hangouts On Air, students can prepare, produce, and broadcast a news show quickly with little to no cost. Here are the steps. Planning Develop segments for the broadcast. Sample segments include … Latest news Sports reports Upcoming events Study tips Teacher feature Student on the street Service spotlight Create a shared document and develop the segments assigning re...

One of the several unpopular assignments I force upon my students is the Sophomore Speech. I am capitalizing Sophomore Speech because it has become a thing at our school … a proper thing. Every single one of my 10th grade students is required to write a personal essay and convert it into a speech to be delivered in front of the entire school during our assembly period we call Break. The word speech has fallen out of fashion these days. It’s much cooler to give a talk than a speech, but talk doesn’t alliterate with sophomore . I guess I could have called them 10th Grade Talks, but as I said, the Sophomore Speech is a thing, so I’m going with it. Of course, I don’t win many votes for Most Popular Teacher of the Year when I announce this assignment to my students. Most members of our species tend to avoid public speaking whenever possible, and you won’t be surprised to hear that some students consider this the waterboard of English assignments. “Mr. Brookhouser, I real...

For their 20% project, Jackie, Jessica, Julie, and Tori decided to work together to produce a curriculum to teach best Facebook practices to seniors at The Carmel Foundation. "Having a super fun [time] teaching people to use Facebook at The Carmel Foundation --- at The Carmel Foundation" After weeks of developing slides, resource materials, and an outline, the day came to take over the computer lab at TFC. Over a dozen eager participants showed up. The group covered topics such as creating a secure password, making sure private posts stay private, and maintaining general Facebook etiquette. They even taught me (a long-time Facebook trainer) about the "Only Me" feature in the status window. I'd never noticed it, but users can treat the Facebook timeline as a personal journal, but, as the students urge, "You can't forget to select 'Only Me' or your personal journal will go out to all your friends!" The staff pleaded the girls to...

For her 20% Project, Audrey is planning a concert with a few of her friends to support a local library in need of books. The concert will be on Sunday, April 21, and admission is one new or lightly used book donation. This project is the result of innovative and creative thinking and a desire to serve a real audience. Great job, Audrey.

Graphic designer, Maya Eilam posted an incredible infographic on Kurt Vonnegut's theories of archetypal stories. I'm using it in my classroom to teach students how to structure the one-act play they're writing. First, we discuss the different forms. Then, I ask students to think of their favorite stories and consider where they fit in this model. Finally, I have them fill out a form like this. Give it a try yourself, and see what submissions other readers have submitted  here . Loading...

Until this week, I've been using three different tools to supplement my professional learning community: Twitter, Google Groups, and a discussion board hosted my the National Association of Independent Schools. I'm sure I'll use these for the foreseeable future, but I think the landscape is going to change significantly with the launch of Google+ Communities. Google Groups and other online discussion boards have been around for decades and are certainly functional. But they've been around for decades and feel slow. The Twitter PLCs I belong to gather around hashtags. For example, once a month we meet on twitter using the hashtag #geniushour to discuss our 20% projects. 20% Time = Genius Hour. The problem with these hashtag meetups is that all of my followers who are not remotely interested in 20% time, or teaching for that matter, get flooded with completely irrelevant tweets. Google+ solves this problem because conversations can rally around specific topic...

I posted another Writing Felony over at grmr.me/who . This one deals with the notorious who / whom problem.

Over the weekend I launched the new and improved grmr.me , a site that allows English teachers to flip their grammar instruction. Rather than marking papers with common writing errors, teachers can now give them a link to a page that has a video that teaches students to identify and resolve the error. Students may also take a short quiz on the topic to earn a badge. The site will continue to grow throughout the year.

Irony is one of the more difficult concepts to teach when discussing literature. For years I've been using Macbeth  to teach dramatic irony. This year I decided to flip this instruction by creating a video. I present Dramatic Irony in Macbeth. I send my students to this link , which has an interactive quiz.

According to the Center for Disease Control , rates of ADHD diagnosis increased an average of 3% per year from 1997 to 2006 and an average of 5.5% per year from 2003 to 2007. How can we as educators combat shrinking attention spans? Easy. We train them. Google Engineer turned Mindfulness expert, Chade-Meng Tan outlines an extremely persuasive argument that attention is trainable in his book Search Inside Yourself, The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) . The simple act of sitting quietly for a brief period of time and paying attention to attention dramatically increases focus. Based on his research, I have my students spend 60 seconds at the beginning of each period in silence. I ask them to simply pay attention to their breath, and if a thought comes up in their head, identify the thought, say hello to it, and let it go by focusing back on the breath. I assign one student a bell and she rings it to begin the practice and then rings it again after on...

Each October at York, we host a day where students bring their grandparents and family friends to school. For almost ten years on this day, I have been having my students take part in Story Corps , a national program where people record interviews of friends and family. Students get the questions by going through the Story Corps Question Generator . I purposely do not record video of the interviews because I believe people are more willing to express themselves without a video camera pointed at them. So I record the interviews with GarageBand, edit the audio with still photos using Camtasia , and upload the full interviews as an unlisted videos in YouTube. Students can archive these recordings and pass them down to their own children and grandchildren. This might be my single favorite thing we do in my classroom. Here's a short sample of the interviews.

I am beginning a series of videos about writing called Writing Felonies . In these videos, I will cover some of the most egregious writing crimes and show how to avoid them or fix them. My first one is about comma splices.

I want to be able to see what it’s like not to hear or say anything and still be able to communicate with everyone. I would also like to share what that’s like with my friends and classmates. I want to know what the challenges are and how people who are deaf take on those challenges on a daily basis. Thus begins Reinel's 20% project proposal. Her plan is to spend a week wearing a headset that emits white noise so that she will be effectively deaf. She plans to create a short film that will document the experience and help spread awareness of the hearing impaired community. You can follow her progress at her 20% Project Blog at  http://makinigatmaintindihan.blogspot.com/ . Please leave an encouraging comment! What is makinigatmaintindihan you ask? So did I. Then she showed this supposed Google Certified Teacher the Google Translate page. Here's a taste of how her week will look ... and sound. 

In my last post , I explained how I use quizlet.com to generate flashcards that randomly choose student names. In this video I explain how to use the Quizlet app on iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to display those cards. I also demonstrate the Android app, Flashcards+ that can download your sets from the quizlet site. Yes, I know I have too many mobile devices.

Don't always call on the kid with his hand up. Use Quizlet.com to create a set of cards that provide random student names. Choose a Study Mode Scatter Learn Flashcards Study these flash cards

Two of the most frequently confused words in the academic English classroom are tone  and mood . For fifteen years, I have been been explaining this difference to my students. Now with the flipped instruction model, I can refer them to this video for homework, and in class we can work on identifying the difference in various passages.

"Today your job is to come up with good ideas. And bad ideas. Really bad ideas." This is how I framed the first 20% Project day in my English class where we create what I'm calling The Bad Idea Factory. The idea came from a workshop I attended while in Bahrain a couple years ago led by Ewan McIntosh. From his blog : When you ask a room of professionals to come up with their “best” solutions to a problem you often tend to get great ideas, but not always the best ones. They can be contrived and almost always involve some self-censorship from the team: people don’t offer anything up unless they feel, explicitly or subconsciously, that it will get buy-in from the rest of the team or committee.  Ask people for their “worst” solutions to a problem and people tend not to hold back at all – laughs are had and the terrible ideas flow. And while the initial suggestions might feel stupid, pointless or ridiculous to the originating team members, these awful ideas can take ...

As I mentioned in my previous post, the first thing I do in class is have my students write and deliver two minute introductions. Obviously it gives me a sense of their writing and presentation skills, but more importantly it allows me to know who they are. Here's the prompt I give them: Your first formal assignment is to compose and present a short introduction so I may better get to know you. I'm only looking for a two minute introduction. I would like you to type it out and then read it to the class. Make sure you save your work somewhere because I'm going to ask you to post it in your portfolio (more on that later). I'd like to get a sense of who you are and what your voice is. Not sure what to write? No problem ... here are some ideas to help get you started: What are you passionate about? What are some of your goals for the year? For your life? What is the most important physical object in your life? (take a photo of it and bring it to class) What is y...