How to break up OER lessons into class periods?

Happy first day of school Kevin Grinstead ! I have the same course load as you (APUSH and World History), and its the same balancing act in both courses - so much to teach, so little classtime!

I agree with everything that's been said here, as far a picking and choosing what to use each year. For some lessons I only use one resource, but for others I might use the whole thing over a few days.  

One thing I have prioritized though all of this is the FUN. I would really encourage you to try to squeeze in those fun openers and closers when you see them, because student buy-in is everything (in my opinion).  The more curiosity you can spark, the easier it is to digest articles and videos afterward.

My World History course is 1750-Present, and I start in September.  Please give a shout out when you reach 1750 I'd be happy to share some more specific plans if you want to throw ideas around.

Thank you! The balancing act has begun. Good luck with your year!

Thank you! The balancing act has begun. Good luck with your year!

Hey there Kevin Grinstead  just wanted to check in and see how your year is going so far with the Global & US courseload.  What is going well so far? And what just isn't working for you? I'm struggling a tad bit with pacing at the moment - trying to fit too many lessons into not-enough time. Where are you in the curriculum?

Hi Julianne,

Apologies this is a month late now. I have experienced some struggles with pacing as well... I took too long to get this off the ground with skills and classroom procedures and now I am in the middle of unit 6 (empires) for the 1200-modern day curriculum.

One primary issue I have ran into is not loving all of the tools at our disposal and not being able to edit them with ease. Some tools really do not work well for how I teach, and some I just don't think are very effective at all for sophomores in on-level world history.

I have found great utility in the document collections and DBQs, though. Those documents and the questions they are paired with can go a long ways with students.

Hi Kevin Grinstead. I am unsure if this is what you mean by being easily able to edit tools, but they are all available in MS Word/Google Doc format, making them easy to manipulate for your classroom needs. 

I have found that, even with this tool, editing the text is poorly optimized and often times destroys or damages the format / structure that makes the tool great in the first place. I will continue to try nonetheless! Thank you for your comment.

One thing I do wish is that there was a way to place a box in the reading to answer the questions. I like to incorporate them with Eduprotocols, and the reading works well with a Cybersandwich.

 Valerie Sanguinetti  have you ever used the Text Reader file? It has all the readings for a unit in Word for easy copy and pasting. That might be helpful to adjust formatting for Eduprotocols.