About
I created my first course website, www.martinsclass.com, in November 2008 during my first year of teaching as a way to encourage students to stay on top of course material, and to make my teaching more transparent. In the 2009-2010 year, I split my website into separate branches, AP Human Geography and Modern World History. I also built the site using wordpress, which enables students to have an account, giving them the ability to create and publish blog posts and static web pages themselves. At the end of the 2009-2010, the www.martinsclass.com domain got filtered by my school district’s content filter (I suspect it has to do with specific terms related to population pyramids and population growth statistics – which unfortunately will not make it to this site to keep it clean and visible).
Thus in this 2010-2011 school year I started two new domains, www.martinsaphug.com & www.martinsmwh.com that will be visible to students in school labs since I use this site weekly as a part of classroom instruction. Most of the information has been transferred, and some new info added.
How to use this site:
This site is organized into a blog and a back-end full of static webpages. These webpages can be seen by searching in the search bar or by clicking on a tag (see the floating ball of words in the right sidebar). There are many webpages that students have created and tagged with relevant terms. When you click on the tag you will see any pages and posts that relate to that concept.
A note to other teachers:
In recent months I’ve noticed that this site is getting more and more hits from all over, and has become referenced on several sites. Please keep in mind that my site is very much an agglomeration of everything I have come across over the past year (going on 2). I am a scavenger and pirate by nature, and am known to borrow, adapt, and utilize any ideas and resources to implement in my teaching for the benefit of my students. I am a firm believer in borrowing ideas that work, and am happy to help share these ideas with other teachers. In fact, you might notice that I’m already using ideas/worksheets/elements from other teachers. I try to give credit where I can, but I’m slightly preoccupied with teaching AP HUG & MWH. For a list of other teachers’ websites – see teacher links.
