Important Links and Info about me

If you wish to contact me, the best way is via email at nicolas1.composto@umconnect.umt.edu or by calling me at 773-870-8135

It is important that all students of social studies stay up to date on current events. While I recommend getting news from a variety of sources (which includes both liberal and conservative sources), I find NPR and PBS Newshour to be the two of the most most useful and reputable sources available:

https://www.npr.org/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/

For additional recommendation on news sources, feel free to reach out to me.

Finally, here is a link to my resume in a Box folder:

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Using Newsela in a Social Studies Classroom

Newsela is an adaptive technology that can be useful in any K-12 social-studies classroom. Essentially, Newsela is a website that compiles news articles from a variety of sources, such as the Washington Post and USA Today, and re-writes those articles at a several of different reading levels. Newsela describes their product, writing, “We publish high-interest news and nonfiction articles daily at five levels of complexity for grades 2-12 using a proprietary, rapid text-leveling process. By combining relevant and interesting nonfiction content with standards-aligned assessments, Newsela gives educators the primary solution to dramatically improve students’ literacy skills for the 21st century.” While Newsela is a powerful piece of technology that can be applied in many ways, its most commonly used in a social-studies setting to allow students who read at different levels to all access the same content without being limited by one’s own reading skill le...

Pirate Podcast

Hi everyone, I have just created a podcast about pirates. First thing I want to note is that it is much longer than the 3 minute limit for the assignment. I have broken the podcast up and at 2.5 minutes I inserted a little break that lets you know that I reached the limit of the assignment, but I really wanted to include all the content that I recorded, so I also have allowed you to continue listening if you desire. Basically, this podcast was a summary of a paper I wrote about pirates a number of years ago. I have always been really interested in 17th century pirates from a social and economic perspective. I find them to be fascinating and in a lot of ways I feel a ton of empathy for individuals who ended up becoming pirates. I have always said that this paper was the most thought provoking paper I have ever written and I was excited to revisit it. I hope you enjoy the content and I want you to remember that the assignment was only the first three minutes, but please feel free to ...

What is Cross Country

Hello everyone, I hope you all are well. This post is actually not about teaching, but rather about the sport that I coach, Cross-Country. Cross-Country perhaps may seem like an odd sport if you have never done it. It might appear to be just a bunch of people running around a field together. In reality, it is much more than that. In order to give you an introduction to the sport, I put this video together. I had never used iMovie before, so there was A LOT of learning involved, but I started to get the hang of it by the end. I certainly have a long way to go, though, in terms of learning to make films. One note- When viewing the video, I recommend watching it in "Theater mode" which can be found in the lower right hand corner next to the "Full Screen" mode. Blogger wouldn't let me upload a video larger than 100mb so this was the highest quality I could upload and it looks a little grainy in full screen mode. I considered just uploading it to youtube,...

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