Internet Archive just launched TV News Search & Borrow a searchable collection now contains 350,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C. User’s can specify search term, network and TV show. In the screenshot (above) I searched the term “47” on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report.”
Internet Archives states “”This service is designed to help engaged citizens better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs. The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired. Older materials are also being added.” Currently 21 networks are searchable (left).
I searched for “Obama” on FOX 10 PM News (below), and found coverage of his convention speech. I could dig deeper into the broadcast to generate minute-by-minute clickable word clouds. (Click on a word and it lights up in each section of the broadcast summary). The user can create a URL to share the clip, but embedding is not available.
This guest post is written by Greg Wimmer, Central York (PA) High School. I met Greg at TechitU and was impressed by the projects skillful integration of technology and community involvement into the hIstory classroom. Greg’s guest post follows:
As the Advanced Placement exam season draws to an end in early May, I am always left with a month to explore the intricacies of US History with my students. I usually throw a big project at them to occupy their time and push their thinking in ways that I could not have done during the course. This past spring, however, my ideas were lacking and I was fishing for ideas from other faculty members. After speaking with one of our tech assistants, who is also a board member for the York County Heritage Trust, I reached out to Dan Roe, the educational director for the Trust. My goal was to hopefully devise a project we could complete in May. Through our meeting, I learned that the Trust had desired to push their walking tours in to the 21st Century. We explored several options, but decided that the students could write and produce movies for the Trust’s historic walking tours that could be accessed via – Aurasma – a location-based, augmented-reality smartphone app (or a device provided by the Trust). What happened to Aurasma?
The students were well aware of the project before May, but we unfortunately had no time before then to begin writing the script. In mid-May 2012, Mr. Roe joined my students for two days of collaborative writing. Their scripts focused on two major aspects of York(town) history: 1. York was the political center of the colonies during part of the American Revolution. 2. The Articles of Confederation were completed and signed in York, making it the nation’s first capital. Two groups (of approximately 6 students each) wrote competing scripts for both of the movies. Mr. Roe read the scripts for historical and contextual accuracy and made notes where appropriate. After rewrites were completed, they spent several days writing shot lists and preparing equipment for the shoot. With the exception of a “student on loan” from the TV production class, none of the students had prior experience with equipment or acting.
Students can do amazing things! It’s not until your own students complete a colossal project, that you truly begin to appreciate their capabilities. ~ Greg Wimmer
The first day of shooting took place at the Gates House and Golden Plough Tavern, both built in the mid-Eighteenth Century. Lighting and acting jitters proved to be the biggest hurdles, but we amazingly made it through all of the scenes in about 3 hours. While on set, the students were shocked with amount of detail involved with shooting such a short film. Their respect for film and movie-making increased dramatical over the course of the afternoon.
Filming for day 2 required the students to prep and shoot on the spot with random merchants in Central Market York. Two groups fanned out, asked for participation, and held up cue cards during filming. We also had location shoots scheduled for that afternoon, requiring students to set up and tear down several times. By the end of day 2, the students were exhausted and ready to get back to school.
Making Of Video
They spent the next week tying the project together. Two groups edited the videos separately, one group worked with Aurasma, and the other group prepped for the “making of” video. The groups that edited were shocked with the painstaking process of parcelling the movie together. They ran in to one or two continuity issues while piecing together scenes, requiring creative editing on their part. The two girls who worked on Aurasma ironed out the dilemma of image-based vs. location-based markers. They also took the liberty of creating a YouTube channel for the Heritage Trust as well as other accounts necessary to manage the videos and augmented reality program. The final group helped to create the raw footage for the “making of” video. They devised questions, created a set, and interviewed each of the students in class. They also interviewed Mr. Roe and myself for the video. They spent their final class presenting all of their videos, accounts, and reflections to Mr. Roe. He was thoroughly impressed with their final product and invited future classes to create more content for the Trust.
Lessons Learned:
Jump In – While I am very comfortable with iMovie, I knew little about the movie-making process required to complete “professional” videos. The Trust project gave me the opportunity to learn with the students and collectively tap our creativity. Two years ago, my AP students completed an archaeological dig at an early Nineteenth Century home behind our high school. I worked closely with someone from the Anthropology Department of a local university to organize the event. Going in to the project, I had zero knowledge on the processes involved in such a project. But that’s the point. Showing students that you can (gently) throw caution in to the wind and work together to create something unique and original.
Don’t trust technology and expecting the unexpected – When we returned to the high school at the end of the first day, we needed to download our video from the camera card to make room on the disk for day 2. Much to our surprise, NONE of the video files were there. After much jiggling and encouragement (and 45 minutes later), the computer read the files. I have honestly never watched a file transfer so closely in my life. In that situation, I would not have known how to tell students that their hard work was for nothing. Thankfully, things worked out!
Students can do amazing things! – Like many teachers, I spend a good deal of time looking at blog posts and twitter links to projects created by other classes. It is not until your own students complete a colossal project, that you truly begin to understand the their capabilities. At the same time, the students were giddy about their final product and recognized that teamwork in an academic setting makes for positive results.
Greg Wimmer is the Social Studies Department Chair at Central York High School. He’s in his 10th year of teaching – AP US History and Honors Global Studies. He describes himself as “a husband, father, teacher, and collaborator, I commit myself personally and professional to producing creative avenues for growth. Over the past 9 years, I have searched for new ways to build student understanding through collaboration and ingenuity.” Greg can be reached via Twitter@gregwim
I recently gave a webinar on getting started with the flipped classroom. Lots of good questions – seems like many teachers see the value in using “flipping” to redefine their classrooms. They recognize that the traditional classroom was filled with a lot of lower-order, information transmission that can be off loaded to “homework” via content-rich websites and videos. That frees up more classroom time as a center for student interaction, production and reflection.
While some may think flipping is all about watching videos, it’s really about creating more time for in-class student collaboration, inquiry, and interaction. It’s also is a powerful catalyst for transforming the teacher from content transmitter to instructional designer and changing students from passive consumers of information into active learners taking a more collaborative and self-directed role in their learning.
In this webinar I address the opportunities and challenges, introduce some fundamentals and offer suggestions for getting started in a feasible way. I suspect that before long, flipping will no longer be as a fad, but simply another way point in the transition to learning environments that blend the best of face-to-face and online learning. Here’s some more of my posts tagged flipped classroom.
Download my slide deck for strategies, resources, lessons and links and more.
The life & age of woman. Stages of woman’s life from the cradle to the grave [1848]
I think that this was a great learning experience. It really got me to think about my own practices in teaching.
I just wrapped up two webinars with teachers participating in a Teaching American History (TAH) Grant workshop hosted at Davis School District, Utah. We held separate one-hour sessions for elementary and secondary teacher focusing on Common Core strategies for using documents to let your students be the historian in your classroom.
I was in Portland Oregon – they were in Salt Lake City, but through the wonders of technology (I used WebEx videoconferencing along with a web-based LearningCatalytics response system) we were able to interact. I don’t think people learn much by telling them things, so I put participants “in their students’ shoes” to experience the power of document-based instruction and four key components to making it work:
The right documents.
Knowing how to look at them.
Letting students discover their own patterns, then ask students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.
Download my slide deck for strategies, resources, lessons and links to great websites.
This webinar was very informative, and motivates me to want to change the way I teach students. I need to allow them to make discoveries and to stimulate their interest, rather than just teach the facts. Thank you so much!!!!!!
Thank you! This makes learning fun and relevant for students. Could spend all summer working on this.
I really enjoyed your webinar. I was introduced to DBQs this last year and was amazed at how much my students bought into it and loved it. They talked about it for weeks. I’m excited to try some of the ideas you gave and am looking forward to using these ideas to create my own DBQs
I think that this was a great learning experience. It really got me to think about my own practices in teaching. The thing that I will remember from this Webinar is the idea that we should let the students come up with their own interpretations of documents and issues, rather than always providing them with an interpretation. Thank you!
Thank you for your time. Everything you presented was valuable to me as a teacher. I am excited to research your website to assist me improve my teaching.
I appreciate the ideas to add some new instructional methods to my classroom. …. I heard great ideas to plug in to start lessons as anticipatory sets, which gave me another way to use primary sources. Thanks!
I this was better than I thought it was going to be. It was informative and interactive. I liked the back and forth that we had. I felt this very helpful. Thank you!
This was great! I can’t wait to try some of these in my class! I think these ideas will really excite my students!
I liked the visuals. I liked that you gave us a picture we’d have a lot of schema on given that we’re in Utah and then one that we had very little information on. Thanks for your website. I’ve used it before.
I loved the idea about the pictures, and making them infer from what they see… it made me engage in the ? much more
This webinar kept me awake with interaction between you, us, and the computer. I enjoyed the images and pictures you shared.
A special hat tip to Jon Hyatt, Teaching American History Grant Director at Davis School District.
Image credit Kelloggs & Comstock–The life & age of woman [between 1848 and 1850]
Library of Congress
The folks at TED talks recently launched TED-Ed to serve the mission “of capturing and amplifying the voice of the world’s greatest teachers.” more In addition to developing a library of instructional videos, they’ve just added a free set of tools that allow teachers to create customized lessons from existing videos on TED, YouTube or YouTube for Schools.
Open a free account at TED-Ed. Once you have selected a video, it will publish to it’s own unique URL. You can share the lesson with students and others via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter. It will exist on its own unique page on TED-Ed, and you can decide who gets to see that page.
Screen shot of TED-Ed interface … yes, that’s me in the ’80’s
In addition to framing a video for your students, you can create multiple choice and open-ended questions, and add additional readings or activities to each lesson you create. After you have shared your lesson, you can log in at any time to see who viewed your lesson, the number of questions they attempted, the answers they provided, and, in the case of multiple choice questions, the number of questions they got right (with their permission, of course).
Want to know more about flipping your classroom – see more posts on my flip tag.
