Category: History

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Exploring History Vol V: Six Document Based Lessons

Exploring history Vol V

I’m very pleased to share a new multi-touch iBook just published by my Social Studies Methods class at the University of Portland. Exploring History: Vol V was our PBL capstone and is available free at iTunes in 51 countries around the world. It features these World and US History lessons:

  1. WWII Propaganda: Close Reading by Nancy Guidry
  2. The Limits of Leadership by Paxton Deuel
  3. African Imperialism by Kelly Sutton
  4. The Harlem Renaissance by Taran Schwartz
  5. Western Expansion Text Set by James Bayless
  6. An Account of The Red Summer by David Grabin

This book is the fifth in a series of “Exploring History” titles designed by my UP preservice social studies teachers. The books have been very popular – with over 30,000 downloads from nearly two dozen countries. Writing for an authentic and global audience has been one of the prime motivators in this on going publishing project.

Interactive iBook version ~ Free at iTunes
Download Static PDF version (10 MB)

It features six engaging questions and historic documents that empower students to be the historian in the classroom. The units draw from a fascinating collection of text and multimedia content – documents, posters, photographs, audio, video, letter and other ephemera. “Stop-and-think” prompts based on CCSS skills guide students through analysis of the primary and secondary sources. Essential questions foster critical thinking. All documents include links back to the original source material so readers can remix the content into their own curated collections.

All of my student’s wrote for a public audience on our class blog and pursued three class goals:

  • Learn to think like a historian.
  • Become a skillful instructional designer
  • Develop technical skills for production, reflection, growth and professional networking.

The lesson design process began early in the semester when students designed lessons in historical thinking skills based on the work of Sam Wineburg and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). They focussed on three key skills – Sourcing, Contextualizing and Corroborating. Then students identified essential questions worth answering and gathered documents to explore the question.

Here’s a post (from fall ’13 class) that describes our project workflow (including how we utilized iBooks Author). The Exploring History includes four additional volume

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Tour Japantown PDX with StoryMapJS and JuxtaposeJS

Northwestern University Knight Lab has produced some great free storytelling tools. I’ve previously posted about comparing images using JuxtaposeJS. It’s great for telling then and now stories when you have a good balance of continuity and change. Here’s a example of frame comparison I made using the tool. Use your mouse to grab the slider and move it up and down.

It shows one of Portland’s Japanese owned/managed hotels back in the heyday of Portland’s Japantown before the forceable removal and incarceration of its citizens during WWII. More on how to create with JuxtaposeJS

Another KnightLab tool is StoryMapJS, a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight locational content. I’ve been playing around with StoryMap and thought it might be fun to see if I could embed JuxtaposeJS sliders into a StoryMap. I think the integration worked well – though it is better viewed from this direct link on your desktop / mobile device than in the embed below. (This embed messes a bit with the size of the feature photos.) As you go though the tour you’ll see I used a mix of static photographs and image blends I made with JuxtaposeJS.

I had lots of great content from my multi-touch book Portland’s Japantown Revealed. It featured engaging then / now photo widgets that allow the user to “paint” history into contemporary photos with a wipe of their finger. So I reused the then / now photo comparisons using the a different tool – JuxtaposeJS and then used them for image content in the StoryMap. Note: Historic images are supplied by Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center. I took the contemporary photos.

Backstory:  I was scheduled to visit Marisa Hirata’s 3rd graders at Portland’s Alameda Elementary School. Students had been researching Portland’s Japantown and had already designed a “shoebox” replica of the community. For my visit, I created this StoryMapJS “tour” and the students used each stop as writing prompts.  This StoryMap was great for helping students to visualize how people’s lives were lived in Portland’s thriving pre-WWII “Nihonmachi.”

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Founding Fathers: From Revolution to Government

My Social Studies Methods class at the University of Portland recently published a free multi-touch iBook – Exploring History: Vol IV. It features eight engaging questions and historic documents that empower students to be the historian in the classroom. For more info on our project and free download of a pdf or multi-touch iBook version click here.

To better publicize student work, I’m featuring each chapter in it’s own blog post. See more in the series here

From Revolution to Government by Valerie Schiller

Valerie frames here lesson with two essential questions: How did the debates of colonial America shape the Constitution? Do these issues still affect American government and its citizens today?

Image credit: The First Continental Congress illustration at the US Capitol
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Holy Propaganda, Batman: Comics Go to War

My Social Studies Methods class at the University of Portland recently published a free multi-touch iBook – Exploring History: Vol IV. It features eight engaging questions and historic documents that empower students to be the historian in the classroom. For more info on our project and free download of a pdf or multi-touch iBook version click here.

To better publicize student work, I’m featuring each chapter in it’s own blog post. See more in the series here

Holy Propaganda Batman! by Karina Ramirez Velazquez

Karina introduce her lesson:

Welcome Historians! This book will help us understand World War II through the lens of comic book covers. I will give a brief introduction on the start of the Golden Age of comic books, and after an introduction of the start of the World War II (1939) and how that influence comic books. The essential question for this book is: What can early comic book covers tell us about World War II? The target audience for this book is ninth grade high schoolers. The historical skills that will be studied are sourcing, contextualization, corroborating, and close reading. The final project will be creating your own comic book cover or meme against or for the U.S. involvement during WWII.

Image credit: Four Favorites “Right in Der Fuehrer’s Face” Wikipedia
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Envision the Moon: From Verne and Méliès to NASA

My Social Studies Methods class at the University of Portland recently published a free multi-touch iBook – Exploring History: Vol IV. It features eight engaging questions and historic documents that empower students to be the historian in the classroom. For more info on our project and free download of a pdf or multi-touch iBook version click here.

To better publicize student work, I’m featuring each chapter in it’s own blog post. See more in the series here

Imagination, Innovation & Space Exploration by Molly Pettit

Molly introduces her lesson with an essential question: What is the relationship between imagination and innovation within the context of space travel?

Imagination and innovation are two key forces that drive history. The stories are everywhere – the phones in our pockets, the computers on our desks, the cars we drive, the medicine we take when we’re sick, even the indoor plumbing we use in our homes.
This chapter will examine how imagination and innovation have influenced space travel throughout history. Using historical thinking skills such as contextualization and close reading to examine text and media sources to unravel the relationship between imagination and innovation, students will analyze how both influenced one of the biggest dreams of the 20th century, and fueled ambitions for the future.

Image credit: By Georges Méliès [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons