On Wednesday I was able to go with my CT to Lansing. We attended the state History Conference on MSU’s campus. I have went to conferences before and not really known how much I actually took away, but this was did not disappoint. I was able to gain some great lessons and knowledge about the high school version of History Alive!, which is just coming out this year.
I did not know this program had not be established at the high school level until recently. They just created the U.S. History set. My CT is excited about this because our department is up for new textbooks in two years and she will now be able to get a set of these books to preview. We talked with one of the distributors and they are setting everything up. I think this is great because this is a textbook the students can really enjoy. They need something that gets them to be interactive with their learning and this is just the thing. I was able to get some pretty good samples from this demonstration.
My CT was not thrilled because all of the session times were messed up due to the opening lasting much longer than it was supposed to. We did not get there early enough for the opening, so we were already out and in the first session, whose leader did not know there were people stuck in the opening. Anyway, all of the sessions were then behind and we did not know what schedule to follow. I thought this was not real convinient. We did not stay through the last session because I had to get back to the school for practice, but it was a good day away from the classroom and gave a nice break in the middle of the week.
That is great that you could take something away from this conference. I also did not know that history alive was not ready for high schools in U.S. history. That is great that this is coming out. I think that this will help a lot of students connect to the material and learn a lot more. I am sure that going to this conference helped you score some brownie points with your CT.
I’m glad you liked the conference and found it worthwhile. I hope it is the kind of conference that you’ll go to in the future.