Tip of the Week: Reading Like a Historian Videos

You may be getting tired of hearing about the work of Sam Wineburg. I do talk about his stuff a lot. I do.

But it’s because the stuff created by Wineburg and others over at the Stanford History Education Group is so good. I’m sure you’ve all been to their site and looked at the 80+ lesson plans – all structured around the concepts of high level historical thinking. I’m sure you’ve all been to the newer Beyond the Bubble historical thinking assessment site.

But perhaps all of you have not seen the the very useful Reading Like a Historian videos. The SHEG people have put together a great series of videos that demonstrated what historical thinking looks like.

5 tasty YouTube channels perfect for history geeks

Yup. I’m a history geek. I’m a member of the History Book Club, I love maps, I stop and read every historical marker before driving past, I spent most of a morning three weeks ago quizzing the docent in the Northfield, Minnesota history museum on the 1876 raid by the James Gang, and I have the Band of Brothers DVD series memorized.

So where do I go when I need a good YouTube video?

Here are five very sweet YouTube channels that are great places for you and your kids.

Tip of the Week: 5 TED Talks Every Teacher Should See

I love TED talks. They’re like the perfect educational appetizer. All of them are quick and easy to digest, they look great, and they make you hungry to learn more.

The problem?

There are just so darn many of them. And it’s too easy getting sucked into the TED talk black hole where you end up watching for hours. But you only have 20 minutes. Which one do you watch?

So in no particular order, and for no particular reason other than these are a few of my favorites, here are five TED talks that every teacher should see:

Learning Together just may be the anti-Khan Academy

One of the problems that I have with the whole Flipped Classroom movement is the idea that we can just give kids videos to watch and expect learning to happen. Many of the videos are simple talking heads or worse (I’m talking to you Khan Academy), simply a disembodied voice talking over slides or a whiteboard.

There’s no interactivity, no discussion. It’s simply a passive video.

Even the very cool TedEd stuff, which is a huge step up from Khan Academy math videos, is basically some kid watching a video alone.

But don’t despair. There may be a solution out there.

Tip of the Week: Visual Discrepant Event Inquiry Modified

Several years ago, I shared a great activity that I call a Visual DEI – with DEI a shortcut for Discrepant Event Inquiry.

The basic idea of a Discrepant Event Inquiry is to present your kids with a puzzling, paradoxical, or discrepant event or story. Students ask questions, pose hypotheses, analyze and synthesize information, and draw tentative conclusions while attempting to find an answer to the inquiry. The cool thing is that you can use a textual or visual version of the strategy.

I love both versions but I really love using the visual side of things. This is what a Visual DEI looks like using PowerPoint or Keynote: