Tip of the Week – 21st Century Historical Thinking and Research

Doing history is not the same as it used to be. Online archives, digital primary sources, software for student products, mobile access. All of these things combine to make research in the 21st century different than when you and I were in school.

So today a few places you can go to help make the transition a bit easier:

Historical Thinker
This site is dedicated to promoting the teaching of historical logic and skills.  Chief among our goals is to provide resources that make writing sophisticated research papers in history easier. Created by a couple of teachers, you’ll find helpful templates and presentations.

Stanford History Education Group
An incredibly useful site with curriculum ready to go, SHEG teaches students how to investigate historical questions employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading.

Digital History
This page of much deeper site provides support for writing history in the 21st century.

Teaching History with Technology
Aims to help K-12 history and social studies teachers incorporate technology effectively into their courses. THWT provides a multitude of free online resources.

Historical Thinking Matters
HTM focuses on key topics in U.S. history and is designed to teach students how to critically read primary sources and how to critique and construct historical narratives.

History and New Media
Digital history is an approach to examining and representing the past that takes advantage of new communication technologies such as computers and the Web. It draws on essential features of the digital realm, such as databases, hypertextualization, and networks, to create and share historical knowledge.

Do History: History Toolkit
Part of the Martha Ballard diary site, this page outlines a useful process for researching and writing history.

National History Day
NHD helps students develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, research and reading skills, and oral / written communication and presentation skills.

Have fun!

New Kansas State Historical Society Goodies on Kansas Day

Mary Madden and Marcia Fox are two of my favorite people.

If you don’t already know, Mary is the Director of the Education Division at the Kansas State Historical Society and Marcia is the Curriculum Specialist. And they do incredible stuff.

They are incredibly passionate about Kansas history and helping teachers integrate high-quality lesson design. Plus . . . they give me free stuff.

I mean, what’s not to like?

Just yesterday, Mary passed on a copy of the very cool Notable Events in Kansas History. The booklet highlights the 12 most important events in Kansas history as selected by the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Kansas History. The panel met as part of the state’s year-long 150th birthday celebration.

The book has a couple of pages of description for each event, photos, a primary source document, essential question and a quick summary of that event’s impact on Kansas and the United States.

Perfect for all grades, you can get a copy at the KSHS store.

The 12 Events?

September 1, 1821 – First party leaves Missouri headed for Mexico on the Santa Fe Trail. This event was the official opening of the Santa Fe Trail. Overland trails helped the nation expand to new territories and initiate trade with neighboring countries.

November 4, 1838 – Potawatomi Trail of Death ends in Kansas. Under the Indian Removal Act, 859 Potawatomi people were forced to walk more than 600 miles to Kansas. As many as 90 different tribes were removed to Kansas in the mid-19th century, and hundreds of native people lost their lives during their first few years here.

May 30, 1854 – Kansas-Nebraska Act signed into law by U.S. President Franklin Pierce. This opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory for settlement and allowed voters to decide whether Kansas would be a free state or allow slavery, and led to a violent time period known as Bleeding Kansas.

February 11, 1859 – The Santa Fe Railway is chartered by Kansas Territorial Legislature. The railroads connected Kansas to the East and the West, bringing new settlers, and determining where cities and towns were built.

July 5, 1859 – Women’s rights included in discussions of Wyandotte Constitution. This was the first of several steps that would eventually give women full voting rights and the right to own property.

March 5, 1862 – The Kansas Legislature formed the Kansas Agricultural Society. These organizations encouraged farmers to grow winter wheat, creating the “bread basket of the world.”

September 5, 1867 – The first load of cattle to be shipped via rail from Kansas. Organized by Joseph McCoy, Abilene became the first of several cowtowns, emerged along the cattle trails and helped create the beef industry in Kansas.

January 1, 1881 – Kansas adopts prohibition as part of the state’s constitution. Kansas was the first state to do so. Carry Nation became known around the world for her support of the prohibition laws.

January 26, 1925 – Travel Air Manufacturing Company established. Owners Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech, and Lloyd Stearman created the “air capital of the world” in Wichita. The companies they created continue today.

April 14, 1935 – A massive front darkens the entire Midwest in clouds of dust on Black Sunday. The Dust Bowl was devastating to farmers across the plains and they eventually changed their farming practices.

April 1, 1938 – Rural electrification reaches Kansas. This allowed Kansas farms to have the same technology, like sewing machines and milk machines, as cities across the nation.

May 17, 1954 – The U.S. Supreme Court announces its unanimous ruling on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This landmark decision determined that separate but equal was inherently unequal, and helped launch the Civil Rights Movement.

As famous Kansan William Allen White said:

For things start in Kansas that finish in history.

Seriously. Get the book. You’ll be a better teacher and your kids will be tons smarter.

#SOTU, document analysis, historical thinking skills and other nerdy social studies stuff

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again. I’m a history geek. And a political science geek and well . . . you get the idea.

So it’s a given that I love a good political speech, especially during presidential primary election season. And the State of the Union address? Of course.

Had it on the big screen, laptop and iPad at the ready for real-time updates and social media commentary. The problem? My mind kept drifting off thinking about ways to integrate President Obama’s speech into a social studies classroom. And not even the speech so much but ways that all of the digital media content and historical thinking skills could be included as part of the learning.

So here goes, a few things you might try over the next few days:

1. Use the online Enhanced Broadcast (with embedded graphics, links and images) to help kids get a better grasp of what President Obama was talking about. This seems like a no-brainer – we know using visuals help the brain grasp big ideas. The site also has links to a transcript so that you can pick and choose what bits to show. I would not show the whole thing – pick a topic like immigration or energy to focus on. An interesting conversation could develop about the use of visuals as a way to influence opinion. Which would have more influence – a simple transcript, a video of the speech or the enhanced broadcast?

2. Scroll down the Enhanced Broadcast site to see ways that you and your kids can use social media to participate in the on-going conversation. This includes the White House Twitter and Facebook feeds. But have your kids do their own research using the Twitter search feature. Use hashtags like #sotu and #stateoftheunion. Have students compare the different responses and thing about reasons why there are differences.

3. Using either the Library of Congress and National Archives document analysis worksheets, have students break down both the speech and the social media response to the speech.

4. Have kids fact check both the SOTU and the Republican response. Discuss sources for this information – where can we find the facts? Are there citations available from the White House and the Republican party? If they get stuck finding things, head to the cool New York Times page with transcript, video and fact checks side by side. FactCheck and PolitiFact are also good for that sort of thing. Have them compare two different news sites to see how the fact checking might be different – CNN and Fox News, for instance.

5. Use Wordle.net to help kids visualize themes in both the SOTU and the Republican response.

SOTU 2012

Republican response

Just a few thoughts. How would you use the SOTU?

Tip of the Week – The Meaning of America and EDSITEment

I’ve had the chance over the last week to work with a wide grade range of teachers, talking about how we can train our kids to think historically. We talked about a variety of things, including the idea of using fiction / non-fiction and historical context as part of your instruction.

And I just found out this morning that the conversation could have been so much better. Why? Because I was missing What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. What So Proudly We Hailed came out last spring but I just found out about it this morning. It would have been a perfect example of the types of resources that are available out there in the wild for us to use with kids.

The editors, Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass, and Diana Schaub, have collected a very nice collection of stories that can be directly integrated into your instruction:

The Meaning of America is a new curriculum for civic education. It is based on our anthology, What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song, which takes a literary approach to making citizens—one centering on stories and supplemented by great public speeches and patriotic songs.

How can we produce citizens who are thoughtfully and knowledgeably attached to our country, devoted to its ideals, and eager to live an active civic life? Studying our documents and learning our history can surely help. But stories are, in our view, even better. We need to furnish our imaginations with true stories of American heroes, stories that inspire emulation and the pride of kinship with those who have nobly gone before—the stories of Washington and Lincoln, of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. But we also can benefit greatly from fictional stories that not only inspire but also instruct. By giving us characters to identify with, stories provide concrete mirrors for self-discovery and self-examination. At their best, they shed light on the complexities of our situation and educate the sentiments in a richer and more sophisticated way.

The Meaning of America is a great site with lesson plans, teaching suggestions and resources that uses a small chunk of the book’s content. It gives you a sense of the kinds of things you can do through the use of fiction and non-fiction content. I’ve got the full book coming and will give you a review once it shows up.

The added extra bonus?

The EDSITEment people will be showcasing the book and lessons throughout the year at their site. And you already know that anything EDSITEment does is quality so be sure to head over there.

Have fun!

10 Great Ways to Make Your Kids Smarter

I’ve always been a Newsweek fan. And in the last year or so, I’ve gotten really hooked on their digital offering, The Daily Beast. A recent Beast article caught my attention that I think we as teachers need to look at.

Written by Sharon Begley, Buff Your Brain: 31 Ways to Get Smarter in 2012 says

If the information isn’t in there, no amount of brain training will tell you how the Federal Reserve system functions, why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the significance of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, or why Word just crashed.

Yet that’s what we all want—to know more, to understand more deeply, to make greater creative leaps, to retain what we read, to see connections invisible to others—not merely to make the most of what we have between our ears now, but to be, in a word, smarter.

The title is fairly self-explanatory. We can make ourselves smarter. And not just by a little bit but what Begley describes as raising our IQ by a “staggering” 21 points. It got me thinking.

If it’s our job as teachers to make our kids smarter, are there any takeaways from the article?

You can read the piece yourself but I think the answer is yes. Here’s what I got out of it.

Get News from Al Jazeera

This may be my favorite. The basic concept here is is simple – don’t shut yourself out from new ideas. A 2009 study found that viewers of Al Jazeera English were more open-minded than people who got their news from CNN International and BBC World. (I’m going out on a limb here and suggest the same would go for for Fox News viewers.) A huge part of thinking historically is being able to see and understand different perspectives. So it doesn’t have to be Al Jazeera but you need to require that kids read, view, and listen to a variety of sources.

Toss Your Smartphone
I’m a big believer in using technology and mobile devices as part of what we do. But the research is pretty clear – constantly checking email, interrupting thinking to text or to go on Facebook disrupts focus and saps productivity. Learning in the 21st century requires the use of a wide variety of tools. Design your instruction to encourage deep thinking.

Go to a Literary Festival / See a Shakespeare Play
I combined a couple here. Reading the Bard has been shown to engage the brain more actively than most contemporary texts and watching is even better. The point here is that we need to use more fiction and non-fiction stuff in our lessons. Great poetry, prose and novels can engage kids and provide very cool historical context

Follow These People on Twitter

There are some very smart people out there. Not all of them are on Twitter but here’s a list I put together a while back that’s still pretty good. Use Twitter to connect your kids with experts and others outside your classroom.

Hydrate
Every doctor will tell you that dehydration forces the brain to work harder and dampens its ability to work well. It’s sounds silly but passing out bottles of water to your kids is not a bad idea. Water breaks during block schedule? Another possibility. Encourage students to pack in refillable bottles in book bags? Yup.

Check Out iTunes U
iTunes U has awesome free stuff. Podcasts, audio clips, documents. There are university and K-12 channels that provide you and your kids access to some of the best thinkers in the country. Did I mention it’s free?

Visit MoMa

You probably won’t be heading the Museum of Modern Art anytime soon (Though MOMA and other great museums have iTunes U content and handy apps.) but viewing art, photographs and images has been shown to increase retention of content. You can make your kids smarter by incorporating images into your instruction.

The Pomodoro Technique
This time-management strategy aims to make you productive using nothing more than a kitchen timer. Use it to break your presentation or your student’s work into 20-minute blocks, taking a short break for reflection and maybe a water break; the frequent rests aid mental agility.

Zone Out
A string of studies suggests that zoning out and letting the mind wander – especially when you don’t consciously realize you’re doing it – allows the brain to work on important “big picture” thinking. “Sleeping on it” is not an old’s wife tale. It provides time for your brain to make connections and see relationships. Purposefully plan for discussions and brainstorming to happen over more than one class period. Then be sure to go back to review and reflect. This could be written, small group or large group. (maybe even all three!)

Write Reviews Online
Anyone can be a critic on the Internet – and your kids should too. Typing out their opinions will help them to better understand their own thinking. This could be book reviews on Amazon, guided prompts on your own Edmodo site, on news sites or in Blackboard CourseSites blogs.

You can make your kids smarter. Pick one or two of these. Maybe five. And start using them in your class. The good news? You’ll get smarter too.