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!

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.

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?

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!

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.

open grate
go south
take axe
fight dwarf
grab bird

This addiction led to Zork, still text-based but a much more difficult game. As a visual learner, it became difficult for me to wrap my head around the many rooms, levels and hallways. Being a geography nerd, I created a series of maps to assist in getting around. The maps also were a great way to add new information gleaned from conversation with others.

Okay. We get it. You were a video game nerd in college. So what?

Pretty simple. What was going on, even though I didn’t know it, was that I was creating detailed mental maps of a specific place. Granted, the place was fictional but I was still able to visualize a geographic place in my head and create two-dimensional map to represent that visualization.

I was already practicing one of the required social studies standards/indicators in many states:

The student uses mental maps to answer questions about the location of physical and human features.

The problem is getting kids to practice creating mental and actual maps with our traditional content. It’s hard to suck kids into geography.

But I recently ran across a fun website that would have been incredibly useful several decades ago:

Mapstalgia – Video Game Maps Drawn from Memory

Map of The Secret of Monkey Island

The site has a ton of maps based on a variety of video games. Think about this for a minute. How might you use video game maps to help kids develop their ability to create mental maps?

These types of maps provide a nice way to teach mental mapping skills – relationships between places, geographic tools, location, scale, cause and effect. Use Mapstalgia to hook your students into thinking about maps and geography.

Have them create the own game maps. Have them compare and contrast maps of the same game. Ask them to think about what a good map must have on it to be a good map. Ask them how maps can be used to “lie” about reality. Ask groups of kids to compare game maps with actual maps.

No matter what you do, feel free to use video game maps to introduce geography concepts and processes to your kids.

It’s gotten better. So I’m back with an update.

YouTube.com/Teachers was created to help teachers use YouTube videos

to educate, engage, and inspire their students.

And the Youtube people are working with a group of teachers to put together a series of  playlists of partner videos that align with Common Core standards. The nice thing about this new addition is the handy-dandy playlists are listed in an easy-to-navigate way.

You’ll find elementary and secondary Social Studies sections (as well as math, Language Arts and Science) with a wide variety of topical playlists. You can also suggest your own playlists to be included in their database.

It looks a bit like a work in progress because they haven’t yet sorted out a ton of videos. But there’s enough there to get you hooked on the idea.

Give it a try. And be sure to have fun!

Have fun!

Library of Congress
From Slavery to Civil Rights: A Timeline of African American History
Some awesome primary sources
Civil Rights for Students
Resources and materials designed to help students gather information and create products
Civil Rights Themed Resources
Study voting rights, maps, political cartoons as well as pamphlets, legal documents, poetry, music, and personal correspondence and oral histories

National Archives
Teaching With Documents:The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
In the 1960s, all three branches of the federal government debated a fundamental constitutional question: Does the Constitution’s prohibition of denying equal protection always ban the use of racial, ethnic, or gender criteria in an attempt to bring social justice and social benefits?
Teaching With Documents: Court Documents Related to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Memphis Sanitation Workers
Martin Luther King was assassinated one day before a second march in Memphis designed to assist African American public workers. This lesson provides primary sources, suggested activities and links.

Classroom Resources for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: Lesson Plans, Activity Ideas & Other Resources for Teaching MLK Day
Help students put in perspective Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life, his impact on the Civil Rights Movement, and his significance to American culture and history with this site maintained by the National Education Association.

Celebrating MLK Day
In recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, here is a collection of New York Times, Learning Network and other materials for teaching and learning about Dr. King, the civil rights movement he led and his legacy.

Martin Luther King Jr Resources for Teachers
Learn about Martin Luther King Jr, an outstanding American leader and hero, who was born on January 15. Share the stories of his vision and commitment by using the activities, lessons, and printables below that detail Dr. King’s life.

ThinkFinity
Do a quick “martin luther king” search here and find 62 incredible lesson plans and resources.

———

Updated January 9th
(A couple of extra sites that should not be ignored but some how I missed both.)

EDSITEment
This site is always a great place to search for useful stuff. Twenty-two great lessons and resources here.

TeachingHistory.org
In honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Teachinghistory.org has created a special spotlight page that features website reviews, teaching materials, quizzes, and ideas for how to incorporate Dr. King’s legacy into your classroom.

But with Iowa Caucuses in the books and fifty-five more primaries and caucuses to go, we’re just getting started.

I’m sure my love for the election game has a lot to do with the fact that we put up with relatively few political ads here in Kansas. The number of delegates is small, number of electoral votes is small and the state has gone red since, well . . . forever. So I get to watch the game without having to listen to the mud-slinging.

Last night, I was up late with CNN getting the first sense of what actual voters are thinking, listening to political pundits, watching the results come in, county numbers appearing up on the board. Who knew that Santorum would win so big in Lyon County?

Okay. I probably could have done without the cheesy shots of people standing behind tables of ballets as CNN field reporters asked them in-depth questions about what they were doing:

Uh . . . we’re counting ballets.

But I think we need more of this sort of thing. While they seem to get their facts wrong more often then they get them right, the candidates are asking us to think about the process, about what America is and how we can be a part of it. As a poly sci guy, I like that.

So . . . a couple of sites I’ve shared with you before that are still very cool:

• FiveThirtyEight
  The best site out there for election nerds, FiveThirtyEight gets it’s name for the number of electors in the Electoral College. Run by Nate Silver, a former baseball sabermetric guy, the site is all about the numbers. Very cool.
• Polling Report
  A little hard to get around in but tons of polling date and numbers.
• RealClearPolitics
  RCP is “an independent, non-partisan media company” that has some great articles, aggregated news and polls.
• Electoral Vote
  Another great site if you’re a numbers nerd.
• New York Times Election
  Lots of good info on candidates, primary dates and data, campaign finance and debates.
• CNN Election Center
  Lots of resources, interviews, polls, links, stories and candidate info.
• Vote411
  Created by the League of Women Voters, Vote411 provides tons of helpful voting resources – perfect for government classes and others looking for election process stuff.

One simple way to use the different sites is to have kids compare polling data from different sites. Most sites use the same results meaning the numbers should be exactly the same but how are the numbers presented? How are trends shared out? Are the polls explained? What analysis is provided?

But.

One of the major iPad problems for educators is that the operating system does not support the use of Flash. Teachers, especially elementary teachers, have always been huge users of sites that require Flash. These sites often feature simulations, online games and video clips. So while there have been benefits to using iPads, teachers have had to modify some lesson plans because their iPads lacked Flash compatibility.

But.

Now there’s hope. iSwifter (an iPad app that allows developers to stream flash games tp mobile devices) has partnered with Discovery, FunBrain and others to offer a new Flash-friendly browser. Called Rover, this new browser allows you to now develop and adapt lesson plans that use both Flash and non-Flash based content on the iPad.

The app claims to be compliant with educational firewalls which has been a problem with other iPad browsers. Sites like addictinggames.com and pogo.com get blocked by Rover. YouTube works great but only accesses education-related channels.

The best part of the browser is that Rover‘s first screen opens up to three featured partner sites and over 40 other Flash-based sites, including BrainPop, that work great. Discovery Education has  also begun using Rover to deliver Flash-based learning apps, lesson plans and materials that enable teachers and students to move beyond the traditional textbook.

I did experience the occasional app crash with Rover and, every once in a while, I couldn’t get the sound to work so it’s not completely awesome. But overall, it’s the first browser that actually delivers Flash content consistently. And the best part?

It’s free.