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...

Kahoot as Formative Assessment

I had never heard of Kahoot until I saw it mentioned on the syllabus for a technology in education class. Upon looking up the website, it became immediately clear that this app would be a great way to conduct formative assessments. Basically, Kahoot is an app that allows anyone to create a quiz on a computer and then present that quiz to students who are able to answer each question on their smart phone or tablet. The platform itself is very engaging and would be easy to use for most high school students. One obvious shortcoming of this app is that if there are many students who do not have a smartphone it could be problematic. To solve this problem, ideally the classroom would have one or two tablets on hand to allow students to participate even if they do not have a personal device. If there is a large number of students in the class without access to a device, Kahoot also offers a team mode that could solve the problem, though it might lead to a less accurate assessment of eac...

Site Map

Hello all, So here is my first post, it is nothing more than a brief map of the site. If you look to the top of the page there are 3 links to 3 separate blog pages. The first takes you to the home page, which will have different blog posts on it. The second is a page titled "My Journey" that tells you a bit about myself and my career trajectory. The third and final page contains contact info as well as links to several websites I find valuable and an embedded widget containing my resume. The blog is simple right now and I look forward to adding to it. Thanks for visiting.

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