Social Studies in the 21st Century Classroom

It’s leap day. And start of MACE day. Which very simply means that today is a great day.

MACE, Mid-America Association of Computers in Education, hosts an awesome conference every March 1st. I’m heading up early to help with our ESSDACK booth and to join in on the pre-conference festivities.

I’ll be presenting a couple of times over the next few days but the one I enjoy the most is when I get to talk and share with other social studies teachers. Great conversations always break out about content and instructional strategies. This year I’m focusing on how 21st century skills, the Common Core, and technology can engage kids and improve learning.

And, yes, a short 45 minute presentation is not nearly enough time. So I’ll spend a bit of time highlighting five habits of mind that are crucial for our students to possess:

• critical thinking
• creativity
• communication
• collaboration
• flexibility

But I’ll also spotlight a few tools, sites, and apps that can help support these habits of mind. Won’t have time for all of them but hope to encourage some sharing of what others use. (You can find the full preso and a complete list of links here.)

A few of my favs?

• DocsTeach
  Four thousand National Archives primary sources, teaching resources, great tools to create your own lessons and the chance to build an online portfolio of your favorite stuff.
• Teaching History
  The perfect place for social studies teachers to grow professionally. Trust me. You need to spend some time over there.
• Edmodo
  Safe, easy to use, school friendly, Facebook social network clone.
• Mixbook
  Create your own awesome online books, teaching materials, and perfect for student projects.
• Mission US
  Two very sweet educational video games that doesn’t feel educational. Designed for middle school US history but I’d use ‘em grades 5-12.
• Readability
  Very handy tool for cleaning up websites. Makes for much easier online reading, storage of content, and printing online content.
• iBooks
  The future, plain and simple. Digital content available anywhere, anytime is where we will all be in five years. Get on board now.
• iTunes U
  Free instructional and learning content perfect for in-class use or 24/7 access. This is a no brainer.

What tools, sites, and strategies work for you in your 21st century classroom?

 

Social Studies really is about stories. And iPads.

It’s a bit of a whirlwind week. A couple of meetings Monday and Tuesday in Kansas, fly to Washington for the National Social Studies Supervisors Association conference then quick jet out to Colorado for the Association of Educational Service Agencies conference this Friday and Saturday.

Not a big fan of the whole cattle car airplane ride, Homeland Security, tiny bag of peanuts traveling thing.

But I’m a huge fan of talking with teachers from all over. Especially social studies teachers from all over. So this is a great week!

Part of what I’ll be doing this week is sharing ways to integrate iPads (and other mobile devices) with the Common Core, 21^st Century Skills and social studies. So it was awesome listening to the NSSSA keynote, Kathy Nordmeyer, talk about almost exactly the same thing. It was a little bit weird . . . I think she stole my notes.

Kathy started with a few questions:

How do we engage our kids in learning?

How do we help insure that our students use 21^st century skills?

Are we using the same tools that our kids are using?

How do we shape a learning environment that provides for life-long skills?

She went on and shared how kids love stories – hearing them and telling them.  Social studies instruction should not be just about facts but all about finding, analyzing, synthesizing and communicating stories. I really haven’t thought about history and social studies quite like that.

I’ve always pushed the idea of mystery and solving problems and using raw materials and collaboration and strong narratives. But I like the idea of describing the social studies content area as one that is all about stories. What would a social studies lesson, or unit or scope and sequence look like if we started with the idea that it’s all about listening to and telling stories?

Mmm . . .

We would need to think more about teaching and using narrative structures. When students write in appropriate ways, the process helps them retain what we read – rather this is a textbook, primary sources or even multi-media. And when we have kids create digital stories and actually publish their work, we’re doing two things – engaging kids in content while also creating great assessment opportunities.

And this is not just engagement with social studies stuff but kids are also learning and practicing 21^st century skills and common core stuff. Kathy said something at the end that caught my attention:

Digital storytelling encourages imagination in our students.

I like that too.

I’ll still do my own presentation but will be incorporating some of the cool things that Kathy shared about stories as a key part of instruction. And if you’re interested, I’ve embedded a short version of my mobile devices and social studies presentation below.

Much of what I’ll be sharing is a few examples of how teachers can use iBooks, Book Creator and ePUBs to push out their own content and Evernote to pull in the work of their students.  Let me know what you think.

NSSSA 2011 – iPads in the Social Studies

View all of my presentations

eBooks, online media and “flimsy paper”

I miss my newspaper.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a newspaper reader. I started small. The Garden City Telegram was an afternoon delivery and just couple of sections but it got me into a routine . . . comics, sports, opinion page.

Went off to college and had the best of both worlds – the Hillsboro Free Press, a weekly local paper with a focus on crop reports, small town events and high school basketball scores and the New York Times, delivered a day late to the college library.

Moves to Wichita and eventually back to Hillsboro hooked me into the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, later just the Eagle. Delivered everyday. To my driveway. In the morning. Comics, sports, opinion page.

Everyday.

Now?

The Wichita Eagle has decided that there are not enough subscribers in the county to justify home delivery. They cut me off a couple of weeks ago.

I’m past the denial stage and have moved into bargaining. I’ll probably end up getting the Hutchinson News. (It’s not bad but, seriously, the Hutch News? How creative, a newspaper called the News.) And I do have the online version of the Eagle, so . . .

My “friends” haven’t been a lot of help.

• You could print out the website on flimsy paper with smudgy ink.
• I dropped my morning statewide paper, because the entire thing is available in their iPad app. The cost is less too.
• I stopped getting the paper years ago. I get all the news on my laptop/iPad.
• You could join the rest of us in the 21st century.

Yeah. I get it. I have an iPad. Two, actually. There are 13 internet devices in my house, not including the Wii, Apple TV and Netflix-enabled Blueray player. I have a website called History Tech. Another called Social Studies Central. I’ve got a Twitter and a Plurk account. I’m on Facebook and use a password app to help me log in to all the different sites I visit. So I am well aware of this whole new world of the Interwebs. But I still need a newspaper.

If you can’t tell, I’m a little bitter.

I’ll probably get over it.

But the whole thing has gotten me thinking about why I like paper so much. And not just newspaper but magazines and books. Especially books. I love books more than I love newspapers.

What I like:

• The smell of books. Especially old books. I walked into the Queen Anne Bookstore in Seattle several weeks ago and immediately fell in love. It smelled like books. And coffee.
• I like the different feel and heft of books. A quality, hard copy is great by the fire. The paperbook version is perfect for the hammock.
• It’s hard to lend someone an eBook. More importantly, it’s hard for someone else to loan me an ebook.
• While it’s possible to know how far along you are in an eBook, a percentage usually of the remaining total, I like dog-earring a page and seeing what I got left.
• No one ever comments on or starts a conversation about the eBook I’m reading at the coffee shop.

But I also started thinking about why I’m falling in love with digital media.

• Small size. I can load up 100s of books, magazines and newspapers on my iPad / iPhone.
• I like being able to create my own books and articles using the ePub format, PDFs and apps like Book Creator. The opportunity for educators to customize content and resources for their own classes is huge.
• I love the fact that digital newspapers, magazines and books can be incredibly deep and multimedia rich. Video, audio, photos, additional information, supplementary materials and collaboration can all be built into digital stuff.
• The problem with Queen Anne Books? Limited selection. I could easily spend a whole day in there but it’s still gonna be just a few thousand books. iBooks, Kindle, digital libraries have hundreds of thousands.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s both/and not either/or. I’m still ticked that the bean counters at the Wichita Eagle cut me off. But I do understand that eBooks and digital media have their own advantages. And as educators, we need to be willing to use both.

——–

Update:

I have been reading the online / iPad version of the Wichita Eagle and getting used to it. But this morning, got this error message instead:

Yes, still a little bitter.

Five iPad apps you can’t live without

No. They’re probably not as important as food, water and air but these five iPad apps are pretty close. They can help you survive your day to day by providing tools for product creation, information gathering and political fact checking.

Book Creator
Book Creator is a simple way to quickly and easily create your own iBooks. When you’re finished, read them in iBooks, send them to your friends or submit them to the iBookstore. The app is perfect for creating picture books, photo books, tutorials, textbooks and student projects of all kinds.

I’m a big believer in the idea that we need to be providing online, mobile access to our content. Book Creator gives you and your students a way to generate and publish ePub formatted stuff without a lot of trouble. It’s got some handy tools for layout, multi-media and publishing. Find out more by viewing the video and tutorials.

ShowMe
ShowMe is an app in the same vein as Book Creator but rather than making a book, ShowMe provides a way to create a presentation with voiceover. It’s basically a doodle pad that allows you to write, insert images and graphics while you talk. These “presentations” are then automatically posted online for kids to access.

Seems like a great way for you to share writing prompts, quick mini-lectures and content reviews. You could also have kids use ShowMe to create simple projects that you could easily access online. See examples and tutorials online.

Newspapers
As history and social studies teachers, we’ve been using current events and newspapers for years as part of our instruction. The new Newspapers app gives you access to over 5000 newspapers from around the world. The app separates the world into Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East, The Americas and the United States. You select a region, then country or state and then city. The link will take you directly to that newspaper’s site.

Newspaper article links can emailed or saved to Instapaper from the preview so that you can read later offline with your Instapaper account.

Instapaper
Speaking of Instapaper . . . this app gives you the ability to store online content on your iPad for later, offline reading. Save web pages for later reading, optimized for readability by deleting ads, images and other unnecessary web stuff. The cool thing is that “Sending to Instapaper” is supported by over 140 other iPhone and iPad apps. You can even send long emails to Instapaper.

Great for long articles and blog posts that you find during the day and would like to read, but don’t have the time when you find them. Save with Instapaper, then read later after school, in a meeting or whenever you have time.

PolitiFact
I’ve written before about the St. Petersburg Times Truth-O-Meter. It’s a great way for you and your students to keep track of campaign promises, statements and press releases. The people in St. Petersburg track everything down and score them on the Truth-O-Meter.

For example, when Rick Perry stated in the September 12, 2011 Republican debate that the “first round of stimulus . . . it created zero jobs,” the Truth-O-Meter banged over to Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

The app tracks by people, promises, trends, stories and subjects. A great way to talk about politics and current events with actual facts rather than “truthiness.”

Tip of the Week – Wikipedia’s Create A Book feature

Okay.

I know some of you are dragging your feet a bit.

Wikipedia? Can’t anyone just edit that and change stuff around?

Yes and no. And that’s actually a good thing.

If you truly are a hardcore Wikipedia hater, I can’t help you. Calmly move along. Nothing to see here. (Go here instead or maybe even here to learn what others are saying about using Wikipedia in Social Studies and general research. If after that, you want to come back and jump in, we’d love to have you.)

But if you believe that Wikpedia has value and can be used appropriately as a teaching and learning tool, then I just learned about a cool little tool that seems incredibly useful. And it’s probably been around awhile but I never noticed it.

Wikipedia can help you create books. Yes, books. And provide a clean PDF. And give you a clean, printable version of articles.

Exactly! Pretty cool, right?

Anyway . . . here’s what you do. Say you want to provide kids with anywhere / anytime access to information about the battles of the Civil War. (Because you don’t have enough textbooks, or the kids don’t take them home anyway or the textbooks just don’t provide the right information or provide it in way that makes it difficult for kids to use.)

Create a list of the battles you want kids to know more about. Head to Wikipedia and do a search for the first battle on your list, Fort Sumter. Once the page loads, look over on the left hand side and you see an option called Print/Export. Open that and you’ll see three options:

• Create a book
• Download as PDF
• Printable version

The last two options are very useful – check those out later. Right now, click Create a Book.

You’ll be asked if you want to start Book Creator. Click the big green button. At the top of our Fort Sumter article, you’ll now see an option to Add this page to your book. That’s it. You’ve added the first chapter to your book.

Now in the top right hand corner, do a search for the next battle on your list. Using the search box and the Add this page to your book option on each page, you will add chapters to your Battles of the Civil War book.

When you’ve added all of your battles, Click the Show Book link. You now can name your book, reorder chapters and delete chapters.

Now you’re ready to download your book. You’ll see the Download option off to the right. There’s some stuff that happens for a few minutes. Eventually you’ll get the option to download the finished document in PDF format.

You now can edit the PDF, post that PDF online, send out as an attachment in emails or texts or print it out as a hard copy if you want. And depending on what app your students have (like iBooks or EverNote), they can access the book on their mobile devices.  (There’s even an option to have someone else print a handy, dandy hard copy version for you.)

But you should also think about making an ePub version of your book. It’s free over at ePubBud. This creates an eBook option available for kids to use in apps like iBooks. They can then takes notes, create bookmarks and highlight text.

Here’s what the finished product looks like: PDF version / ePub version

Need a refresher? Wikipedia has a nice online tutorial.

Have fun!