Jeff Gerlach

Welcome!

For the past four years I’ve had the opportunity to teach and learn from a great group of young people from John Glenn High School and Franklin Middle School within the Wayne-Westland Community School District. Here I’ve taught courses on how governments work (civics), how money is spent affects people’s lives (economics), …

Storyboard/ Video as Alternative Assessment

Plate Tectonics’ Effects on People – Storyboards, a set on Flickr. As a technology nut, I love when I can couch an alternative assessment within a project based activity. A great example from this school year was a storyboard/ video project that students created. The goal was to envision and …

Meeting the literacy challenges of Common Core with tech interventions

I provided my kids with podcast/audio streams to help them read primary and secondary sources, click the image below or hit it here to view an example module. My colleagues and I are still wrapping our head around what Common Core and Smarter Balanced Assessments ”look” like in our social studies classrooms. …

Course Companion Website

As of the creation of this post, my role in education is that of a social studies teacher in a face-to-face environment. As a companion to my course(s), I construct classroom websites that serve as an online companion to the daily activities that we complete in our physical environment. My …

Movie Ideas Captured

I’m really big on note taking strategies that allow students to decide what is important and be as creative as possible in the process. It may be purely semantics, but when I see the phrase ‘taking notes’ I think of writing down someone else’s ideas, verbatim, in the same form and structure that …

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