First off – big shoutout to Jamie Clark – A talented educator to follow on Twitter @XpatEducator. See his collection of Teaching & Learning Resources. (Lots of great free downloadable templates.). I used one of his templates as the basis for this lesson
Here is a repost of the lesson I assigned my University of Portland pre-service teachers. Original here.
In honor of the historic nature of the 2020 election, students will have the opportunity to explore historical turning points and their own creativity by designing an alternative history. Students should have fun with this. It could be set in any era or region of the world.
You should embed the slide show in a post. Include at least an explanation on why you feel this event was a historical turning point.
I got very positive feedback from students who really enjoyed this lesson. They also thought it could be easily expanded so that students had to defend their alt histories. Another ideas was for the teacher to assign everyone the same real events and let students focus on creating and defending their own alt histories.
Here’s a few of the alt histories my students created.
I have been teaching my pre-service social studies students historical thinking skills based on the work by Stanford History Education Group. (SHEG). I created – what I call a “Hexagonal Thinking Corroboration Tool” to help them work with corroboration skills. For content we used a selection of documents from the late 19th century curated around the them of rise of industrial America.
I’m sharing the idea to help teachers assist students in making connections. You can easily modify with new content boxes to match your instruction.
In my Ed Methods class, students worked remotely in teams to explore the documents in my book, Progress and Poverty in Industrial America (available free at iTunes). Also available online as a Microsoft Sway. We used the 11 sources to create a graphic organizer that responds to the essential question: “How do we evaluate the social costs and benefits of technological innovations?”
Hexagonal Thinking Corroboration Tool
They had read all the documents in advance of class. As part of our Zoom class session, I put them in breakout groups and supplied them with a Keynote file “Hexagonal Thinking Corroboration Tool.” Corroboration prompts are from SHEG. This thinking tool was inspired by this post. Keynote design adapted from here.
Instructions: Work with the members of your breakout group to corroborate the source readings.
Move the source document boxes into spaces on the grid.
Arrange the boxes so you can make connections between two or more source documents.
When you have made an association between two or more documents, move one of numbers to that point
Use the final slide to identify five key connections among the documents.
Corroborate the sources in the connection and create an explanation of what you belief to be the most probable account.
As a final exercise, I supplied them with a Google Jamboard and asked them to evaluate the question “How do we evaluate the social costs and benefits of technological innovations?” in the context of the modern world.
Most materials are in the public domain if they were produced before 1923. I see this as roughly equivalent to everything that happened in the world up to and including World War I! If you’re looking for newspaper articles in Chronicling America, for example, you will note that coverage ends in 1922.
Primary sources produced by the federal government are normally in the public domain both before and after the magic copyright date of 1923. That explains why we as teachers can use the fabulous oral history interviews of former slaves collected between 1936 and 1938 by workers from the Federal Writers’ Project.
Focusing your search using a search operator. [site:loc.gov]
Image Detective Activity (inspired by Crop It lesson)
Being able to find and curate historical source material is a foundation of historical thinking. This activity merges three instructional goals: finding / curating historical sources, looking closely at historical sources and using WordPress tools to add images and hyperlinks. It will help students learn how to find material for future lesson design activities.
For each image: provide full image with citation in hyperlink back to source
Then add a of crop area of each image to show one of the following clues (add clue in the image caption) Tips on how to crop an image
Put all content into a post. Give it a clever title. Include a featured image.
who or what this image is about.
where this takes place.
when this happened or was created.
what is the creator’s point of view or purpose.
something I have a question about
Example: Image with two crops
African American Soldiers in an Automobile SourceWhen? It’s an upside down 1919 NYS license plate. I think they are returning Black WWI soldiers in a parade.These Black soldiers are being honored in a parade. Knowing 1919 is in the Jim Crow / KKK era, I wonder what else faced them back in America?
In class practice images. Choose one. Add to a sample post. Include source hyperlink and crop with comment.
Smartly dressed couple seated on an 1886-model bicycle for two 1886. Source
The 8th Avenue trolley, NYC, sharing the street with horse-drawn produce wagon and an open automobile 1904 Source
Automobile helped through sandy wash onto mesa 1911. Source
Women’s Machine Gun Squad Police Reserves, New York City 1918 Source
Notice some of the fashion choices of these women. For example, all but one of these women have chosen to wear pants rather than skirts. Do you think this was a normal clothing choice for women in the 1920s? Could their outfits be related to the social statement they are making?
Teachers are looking for resources for online instruction. So I am reposting lessons from my Social Studies Methods Course at the University of Portland’s School of Education. See original post here.
Teachers can use historical documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But document-based instruction in this context requires four key elements to be successful:
The right documents. (shouldn’t be reliant on background knowledge)
Knowing how to “read” the historical document.
Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.
In Class 7 we will practice some strategies for assisting students to more closely read a document (in all their multimedia formats) by answering three Common Core questions. Broad version:
What does it say?
How does it say it?
What’s it mean to me?
More specifically, what do we mean by close reading? Teachers can guide students with scaffolding questions that explore “texts” (in all their forms).
Key Ideas and Details:
What does the text say? Identify the key ideas. What claims does the author make? What evidence does the author use to support those claims?
Craft and Structure:
Who created the document? What’s their point of view / purpose? How did the text say it? How does it reflect its historic time period?
Integration of Knowledge and ideas:
Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text. Recognize disparities between multiple accounts. Compare text to other media / genres. How does it connect to what we’re learning?
And what’s it mean to me?
IN CLASS ACTIVITY
Find a historical image and pair it with one of the Primary Source Icebreakers. The post to the padlet below. Include title of icebreaker, response to prompt and hyperlinked source of image. (See example below) These icebreakers are from TPS Connect at MSU Denver.
Teachers are looking for resources for online instruction. So I am reposting lessons from my Social Studies Methods Course at the University of Portland’s School of Education. See original post here.
Today’s class will focus on finding and curating historical content – in this case images. Our focus will be on sourcing material that is in public domain using our historical archive resources.
Most materials are in the public domain if they were produced before 1923. I see this as roughly equivalent to everything that happened in the world up to and including World War I! If you’re looking for newspaper articles in Chronicling America, for example, you will note that coverage ends in 1922.
Primary sources produced by the federal government are normally in the public domain both before and after the magic copyright date of 1923. That explains why we as teachers can use the fabulous oral history interviews of former slaves collected between 1936 and 1938 by workers from the Federal Writers’ Project.
Class Session
Class will open with a discussion on strategies for supporting remote learning – both in our course and our student placements.
Next, Peter will share some information on public domain and Creative Commons. He will also share strategies for searching using a selection of historical archives.
Students will then practice:
find a historical image
download it
get citation information and source URL
adding image to practice post
include citation with active hyperlink back to source in image caption
Lastly, Peter will introduce this week’s assignment and some strategies for working with WordPress to create learning activities base on close readings of historical images.
Assignment 2
IMAGE DETECTIVE CHOICE 1: (INSPIRED BY CROP IT LESSON)
Being able to find and curate historical source material is a foundation of historical thinking. This activity merges three Instuctional goals: finding / curating historical sources, looking closely at historical sources and using WordPress tools to add images and hyperlinks. It will help students learn how to find material for future lesson design activities.
for each image: provide full image with citation in hyperlink back to source
then add a of crop area of each image to show one of the following clues (add clue in the image caption) Tips on how to crop an image
Put all content into a post. Give it a clever title. Include a featured image.
Possible questions:
who or what this image is about.
where this takes place.
when this happened or was created.
what is the creator’s point of view or purpose.
something I have a question about
Example: Image with two crops
African American Soldiers in an Automobile SourceWhen? It’s an upside down 1919 NYS license plate. I think they are returning Black WWI soldiers in a parade.These Black soldiers are being honored in a parade. Knowing 1919 is in the Jim Crow / KKK era, I wonder what else faced them back in America?
IMAGE DETECTIVE CHOICE 2: CREATE AN IMAGE COMPARE
WordPress now has a built in “Image Compare” block. Find a two suitable images to compare and use the compare to explore continuity and change.
Do the image compare for two sets of images. So you will have two separate “image compares” with guiding questions for each.
Possible questions exploring continuity and change:
what is the same?
what is different?
what do the similarities and differences tell us?
how are they explained by historical events / trends?
Note that this post uses JuxtaposeJS to create the same image compare (it was before it came to WordPress). So ignore that aspect and focus on examples of comparative images and my technique for getting best image alignment. I used Google slides in video. But same technique would work in Apple Keynote.
Here’s a video where I demonstrate how to align the images and export as image files using Google slides. Ignore the fact I was using JuxtaposeJS. I start it about a minute in.
Here’s how to get Keynote into a portrait shaped size for comparing portrait images. Set custom size to 768 width by 1024 height
In Keynote change document format to a vertical portrait shape
Here’s how to align images.
Click on image. Then open Format window. Click on Style. Then adjust the opacity slider to where you want it. Once you have images aligned, remove all opacity. Duplicate the slide with one image on each.
Click on image. Format:style: adjust opacity
Then export the two slides as images to use in your image compare
