I’ve been in love with Google Earth for years. It truly is a one stop shop for social studies teachers. Multiple layers of data, GoogleLitTrips, 3D buildings, historical imagery, Tour Guides, Google Earth Gallery – just about anything we need, I’m pretty Google Earth can do it.

And StreetView. Personally I think it’s magic. Especially when they use it to buzz down into interiors of buildings and onto famous landmarks.

I recently wrote about a very cool game called Pursued that takes advantage of the StreetView option in Google Earth. There are others.

One game that just came out is called GeoGuessr – same sort of idea as Pursued. You are given access to a StreetView somewhere in the world and using contextual clues, you have to guess where you are at. You are awarded points for how close your guess is to the actual spot.

Tons of geography stuff going on in these sorts of learning activities – absolute vs. relative location, regional differences, cultural differences . . . you get the idea.

Some of the games built into Google Earth or created by others using Google Earth are focused more on fun. Like the Flight Simulator you can find buried inside Google Earth. But all of them help create a sense of place, a mental map of the world, encourage kids to enjoy geography and the questions surrounding the discipline.

You might want to check out some of the other games:

Streetview Zombie Apocalypse
You select a location where you want to get dropped and using StreetView, have to avoid, well . . . zombies who want to eat your brains.

StreetView Quiz
Pretty much what it sounds like. Questions that you can solve using the clues contained in the StreetView.

Real World Racer
Choose a route (a pre-created one or one that you ask your kids to create) and then race your car against the computer using keyboard controls. Pretty simple but you could have kids create a track around a battlefield or through different regions.

I’m a little biased, of course. I like this one. It’s been around since January 2008 and so I’m kind of invested. But I do think there is room for another social studies blog – the more conversations we have about what we do and how we do it the better.

So.

A new blog.

Titled Doing Social Studies and maintained by the Kansas Council for the Social Studies, the site is a place

for a variety of voices to discuss what high-quality social studies looks like in the 21st century. KCSS board members and other educators from around the state will share ideas, resources, and materials about how we can all do social studies better.

Full disclosure – I serve on the KCSS board and am part of the writing team that is working to fill the site with content. We hope to use Doing Social Studies as a common meeting place that talks about all sorts of social studies related stuff. I especially like the idea that you’ll hear multiple voices – elementary teachers, secondary, higher ed, administrators, hopefully even a student or two.

The hope is find the best ways to actually do stuff with social studies, rather than just memorize it. To share ideas. Resources. Strategies. And walk away better educators and learners.

Doing Social Studies will have a Kansas twang, to be sure. After all, we’re from around here. So we’ll probably spend time discussing the impact of our new state social studies standards. There’s gonna be discussion about the politics of education in the state. You’ll hear about local examples. But I’m pretty sure you’re gonna find a lot of overlap. Social studies is social studies no matter where you’re at.

Go check it out, join the conversation. It’s new and we’re still finding our feet . . . so give it a few months over the summer and through next fall.

Cause you can never get enough social studies.

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Teacher quality is important. But I personally have issues with politicians and others not directly involved on the front lines claiming to know best when it comes to measuring teacher quality. Common sense and research suggests that kids are successful or not for lots of reasons.

And while the political mess of teacher evaluation by schools and districts will continue, I still believe that as professionals we have an obligation to reflect on a personal level about our own best practice. Constant improvement is a good thing. And I also believe that there is a lot of value in asking our kids, our customers, to be a part of that evaluation process.

We’re not talking here about formal teacher evaluations here – this is personal professional development. Asking questions about what we do and how it impacts our students.

I never really thought much about having my students complete evaluations during my first couple of years teaching. It was obvious, even to a rookie teacher, what needed to change, right? Plus, it just wasn’t done. I mean, who asks for the opinions of school children?

I would always try to spend time reflecting at the end of the year:

• What went well?
• What went wrong?
• Were my assessments valid?
• Did I handle classroom management issues effectively?
• What content should I add / eliminate for next year?
• Do I need to adjust my rubrics?

But it was only one point of reference. And we know how incomplete any sort of administrative evaluation can be. Some excellent mentors eventually convinced me that feedback from my customers would be a good idea, that a good student evaluation can help in my reflective process.

So I started talking more with my kids, both informally throughout the year and formally at the end. Questions about the classroom environment and arrangement, did I provide enough time for projects, how well did I respond to student questions, did I create a friendly learning climate, what strategies and activities worked best, what sort of communication works best, more or less technology and what they liked / disliked in general.

Need a bit more rationale for this?

Try an article, Why Kids Should Grade Teachers, from The Atlantic that discusses the power of student feedback. You can find the Measures of Effective Teaching research mentioned in the article here. And you may not agree with all of it. I get that. But the idea still makes sense to me. Kids spent months in my classroom – their perspective is important in helping me understand the impact I’m having on them, good and bad.

Students should feel free to put their name on the evaluation or complete it anonymously. And while you’ll need to take the information with a grain of salt, you also get some great feedback and insightful comments.

I’ve attached a couple of quick samples. Feel free to adapt them for content and age levels.

• Teacher Evaluation by Students – Basic version
• Teacher Evaluation by Students - Bit more complex

Reflect away.

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Joe Phelan, an educational liasion, describes EDSITEment as:

the K-12 digital outreach program from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are especially strong in US History, government, American and British literature as well as art and culture. Our online lesson plans are built around guided reading of  primary sources which are carefully contextualized and  stress critical thinking and other 21st century skills.

There are tons of lesson plans and other handy resources. One of their sweet pages highlights a variety of tools for analyzing primary sources and close reading. These links direct you to other websites and references to resources available through government, nonprofit, and commercial entities.

• Using Primary Sources in the Classroom (American Memory Project, Library of Congress)
• History in the Raw (National Archives)
• Document Analysis Worksheets (National Archives)

Close Reading Guides

• How to Do a Close Reading (Harvard University Library)
• Reading Critically (Harvard University Library)
• How To Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch
• Poetry: Close Reading (Purdue OWL)

Close Reading Webinars

• Teaching Through Close Reading: Historical and Informational Texts (National Humanities Center archived webinar)
• Teaching Through Close Reading: Poetry and Fiction (National Humanities Center archived webinar)

• Google Earth.
• Landsat images.
• Change over time.
• Cool tools for instruction.

What do they all have in common?

Psst. I’ll give you a hint. They were approved last month.

That’s right! The new Kansas social studies standards and even some of the Common Core literacy pieces are asking kids to analyze change over time and to evaluate relationships between people and place. And it’s a good thing.

But are there tools floating around that I can use to help kids do that?

Yes. You can thank Google, the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and TIME. Together they have created something very cool – time lapse satellite images of just about any place on earth from 1984 to 2012.

Need a series of images highlighting melting glaciers? The spread of irrigation in Saudi Arabia? Amazon de-forestation? The growth or decline of your own city? With the new Timelapse tool, built from millions of satellite images and trillions of pixels, now you can.

You get four default views of dramatic changes on the Earth’s surface such as the sprouting of Dubai’s artificial Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, and urban growth in Las Vegas.

But here’s the sweet piece of the site – clicking the Explore the World tab lets you do a search for just about any place in the world. You can then zoom in and scroll the resulting map to get just the view you want. How cool is that?

Start thinking about the kinds of problems and questions you can create that kids will need to solve:

• Why would anyone want to create their own islands?
• What impact does deforestation in South America have on other parts of the world?
• Why did our city get bigger (or smaller) since 1984?
• Are some areas and cities growing faster than others?
• How has our use of Earth’s resources benefited us? How might our use impact the lives of our grandchildren?

The Google people think these sorts of images can help us understand how we live with each other and with our planet:

Much like the iconic image of Earth from the Apollo 17 mission – which had a profound effect on many of us – these time-lapse maps are not only fascinating to explore, but we also hope they can inform the global community’s thinking about how we live on our planet and the policies that will guide us in the future.

I agree. This is literally the kind of big picture stuff that can help us support critical thinking in our kids.

And the added bonus? It’s gonna help you align your instruction with new state and national standards.

Seriously. How did we live without Twitter?

I kid because I love.

Twitter really is a pretty amazing tool. Revolutions in Egypt. Live updates on natural disasters. Connections with loved ones thousands of miles away. Not to mention a decent instructional strategy.

We’ve talked about using Twitter in the social studies before. And so when I came across Tweet the Debates, I was more than just a little curious. Created by artist and lawyer Toby Grytafey, Tweet the Debates is his attempt to recreate the summer of 1787 as if those attending the Constitutional Convention had access to social media.

It’s an interesting concept that has worked for other historical events. And it sounds pretty cool. Toby started a Kickstarter project that was hoping to raise funds for a mobile app and other goodies. Even if the fundraising idea fell through, the actual Tweet the Debates idea is awesome.

Toby uses a quote from James Madison, apparently written in the spring of 1835, as inspiration for the project:

Considering the peculiarity and magnitude of the occasion which produced the Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, the Characters who composed it, the Constitution which resulted from their deliberations, its effects during a trial of so many years on the prosperity of the people living under it, and the interest it has inspired among the friends of free Government, it is not an unreasonable inference that a careful and extended report of the proceedings and discussions of that body, which were with closed doors, by a member who was constant in his attendance, will be particularly gratifying to the people of the United States, and to all who take an interest in the progress of political science and the course of true liberty.

The idea is pretty basic. Madison knew that learning more about the process of 1787 can make us smarter in 2013. So let’s take advantage of what Madison left us. You can catch Toby’s thinking here.

So. How would the “proceedings and discussions” have sounded as a Twitter feed? How might the conversation have evolved if more of it had been public? All tweets will be linked to actual speeches made during the Convention so there are some incredible learning opportunities here.

But the idea is deeper than that. If we can “witness” the literal creation of America’s government and listen to the voices of the people who created it, what can we learn and apply to our current situation? There were very obvious and deep disagreements among the Convention’s participants. Yet they somehow managed to pull off perhaps the greatest upset of all time – the creation of a document that has withstood over 200 years of history.

I love the concept. Multiple Twitter users represent the various members of the Convention and, while staying in character, will discuss and argue “live” through the summer and into September. Law professors, rappers, history bloggers, civics teachers, actors, judges, comedians, Twitter stars and advocates of every political persuasion will use their voices to tell the story of the Constitutional Convention.

Get involved at the main site, find more info on the Kickstarter site, and follow along via Twitter.

And then start your own debate. How can you use this idea to connect with other classrooms around the country to discuss this topic? Other topics? What did civic discourse look like in 1787? In 1830? In 1860, 1941, 1954?

What does it look like right now? Does social media help or hurt the process?

So many questions. So many awesome learning opportunities!

“Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!

It’s a great line.

But in 2013, it would be wrong. In 2013, badges are a big deal. And used appropriately, badges can help us do our jobs better.

What are badges?

According to OpenBadges, a badge is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, competency, or interest. Badges can be used to represent achievements, communicate successes, and set goals. They can support learning that happens beyond traditional classrooms. By providing a more complete picture of what learners are capable of and passionate about, badges act as signals to potential employers, collaborators, fellow students, and social groups.

We’ve always had badges. Remember the Boy Scouts? They have badges. Video games? Badges. Olympic Games? Okay, medals. But medals are the same shape as badges and work the same way.

And now many are starting to see a use for them in education.

One of those who have jumped on the badges bandwagon is the Smithsonian. With their new Smithsonian Quests program, they use badges to inspire students to explore their own ideas and interests online, in school, at home, and with other kids. The quests connect and reward learners of different ages and 
in different regions as they learn through discovery and collaboration.

The primary goal of the Quests program is to inspire youth to explore their own interests through a series of online 
activities and related incentive badges. The second goal is to
 enhance students’ cognitive capabilities by incorporating knowledge and skill-building into the
 quests. Special online conferences and quests are interdisciplinary in nature, offering students the
 opportunity to choose what they care about most.

The program aligns with many Common Core standards, as well as other national education standards in a variety of subjects and highlights 21st century skills. There will always be some type of “artifact” that the student will produce, whether through a creative writing assignment, a photograph, artwork, a graph, etc. that will be submitted online for approval.

All quests engage students in exploring a topic of interest either as part of a formal standards-
aligned school curriculum or as a student-driven after school activity. An important secondary
 audience is us – teachers who are working with kids but can also become involved in Smithsonian online
conferences, online professional development sessions, and the completion of class projects. And yes, we can also earn badges!

The signup process is relatively painless and the potential benefits are huge.

Badges? Yes, we do need stinking badges.

It’s a discussion / debate strategy that I haven’t seen used before. And it worked great so I figured I would share it with you.

History and social studies classes are perfect places for debate. And we’ve all used debates as part of what we do. I’m a big supporter of the idea of having kids research and use that research to create persuasive arguments. I especially like the Fence Sitter idea.

But with these types of class activities, it’s easy for students to lose sight of the objective and get very competitive, focusing more on winning the argument rather than about what they should be learning. And I admit, I’m probably the worst. I love a good social studies argument. And I love to win.

Cause I’m right.

Always.

The Structured Academic Conversation can help with this problem. Kids still “argue” but the focus is on deliberative and civic discussion rather than winning the argument. It’s not just a pro/con debate but the sort of conversation that actually solves problems, the sort of conversation we’d like our elected officials to have.

The SAC was developed by David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota as a way to guide classroom discussions and to help students reach consensus while understanding contrasting positions.

Preparation steps

1. Select a historical question or statement that has contrasting viewpoints. For example:

• Did we have to use atomic weapons to end World War Two?
• Was the Civil War avoidable?
• Detaining Japanese Americans in internment groups during the 1940s was the right thing to do.

2. Find a variety of documents that support each side. These could be a combination of both primary and secondary sources.

3. Think about how you will group students. You need groups of two that will later join another group to create a group four. Make copies of the documents or post online for digital access. For a SAC with four documents, plan on using about two class periods.

The SAC strategy has five basic steps. Check out this example from the Stanford History Education Group people. (Anyone can view the example and documents but you’ll need to create a free account to download the lesson.)

1. Organize students into four-person teams comprised of two groups of two.

2. Each group of two uses the documents you prepared that represent different positions on your question or statement. Use the example to help kids track their analysis and prepare their positions.

3. The two smaller groups come back together and present their positions, taking turns as presenters and listeners.

4. This step is where a SAC differs from a typical debate. Rather than working to disprove the other position of the presenting group, the listeners simply repeat back to the presenters what they heard and understood. The groups don’t swap presenting / listening roles until the original presenters are completely satisfied that the position they shared has been parroted back correctly. The focus is on making sure both positions have been presented and understood.

5. After both groups have been heard and are satisfied that their position has been understood, both groups abandon their original assignments and work together as a group of four to reach a consensus. If consensus becomes impossible, the team spends time understanding what differences still exist.

A few tips

We’ve trained our kids to be winners – that a debate has a loser. So no matter how much you tell them, someone will still work to refute rather than to understand. So . . .

1. Practice active listening skills with your kids before turning them loose.

2. Make a rule – No interrupting during presentations. Ask kids to take notes about things they want to ask about later.

3. Kids will want to know what the “correct” answer is, to know who won. Encourage them to embrace the uncertainty that comes with doing history. There often isn’t a correct answer.

Have fun!

And a big Kansas Day fit the bill.

We organized all sorts of activities and projects for the day that students rotated through. Kids weaved wheat into hearts and shapes. They punched tin for pioneer lanterns. Sewed quilt pieces. Played frontier games. We had a blacksmith set up shop who demonstrated how to make horseshoes. A storyteller came and entertained.

It was always such a great day. Parents loved it. Made our principal look good when he talked with the newspaper guy. Kids were up and moving around.

It worked out so well that I started doing more projects and activities. I had kids use potatoes and paint to make African Ashanti cloth. We played Oregon Trail. Kids simulated the Constitutional Convention. You get the idea.

I was Project Man.

Because projects are good, right? My job was to engage kids. Have fun. Hook kids into liking social studies?

But the further I’ve gotten from Kansas Day, the more I realize that I had the wrong end in mind. I wanted my kids to enjoy my class. And I think they enjoyed stuff like Kansas Day and Oregon Trail. But fun isn’t the goal. Learning is.

Projects don’t necessarily equal learning. Projects equal busy. And while fun and engaging activities are not wrong, if we focus just on engaging, we miss the point of why we’re here. Nothing wrong with fun but we have to be clear that it doesn’t get in the way of learning.

Sam Wineburg of the Stanford History Education Group spoke at a joint Kansas / Missouri history conference several years ago and did a quick Q & A:

I don’t think that a history class should be about things such as History Alive or about making cute posters, or about making history “engaging.” It’s about getting students to thinking rigorously about the evidence. Fun is okay, but I would rather have them hate the class and come out of the class having the skills needed to be good citizens than having them enjoy themselves.

I’m beginning to agree.

The cool thing is that there are lots of fun and engaging things that we can do with kids that still end up with them learning what we want them to learn. I really like the work that Wineburg’s group is doing with curriculum – it focuses on historical thinking, content, and, because it starts with a great question, it’s engaging for kids.

A friend of mine who’s busy teaching 8th graders told me this morning:

I am ending my year running my kids through nearly every Stanford History Education Group lesson plan over Civil War and Reconstruction. They like it . . . and it’s so teacher friendly.

For those of us who focus on projects and those who believe in the power of traditional lecture style instruction, a recent article in the latest Stanford alumni magazine will be helpful. (Sam sent a PDF version as well.) The article highlights what instruction can look like when it’s focused on both engaging kids and teaching them to think historically.

We can be both. Project Man and facilitator of learning. And if we want to be the best we can be for kids, we need to be.

Is the iPad a solution or problem?

It’s a great question. There are tons of people jumping on the iPad bandwagon and I’ve suggested before that many of them are hopping on with their eyes closed. It’s a shiny tool that attracts a lot of attention. But is all of the attention a good thing? Greg says maybe not:

If the iPad is a solution, then the problems that it can solve in the existing structure, time and space provided by schools are easily solved and will not lead to any substantial change that allows students to demonstrate their understanding through the process of creating content.

If we view the iPad as a problem, it will force us to consider the changes that may need to be made in order to unleash the full potential of this device when placed in the hands of students. This is a good problem, one that will have us rethink learning spaces and the environments in which our students grow and learn.

Think this through a bit. Are we using the iPad as a jet engine on a stagecoach? We often see “school” in a certain way. It looks like this. Teachers do this. Kids do this. It happens at these place and times. And we try and fit new technology like iPads into that world view.

We see the iPad as a solution to traditional sorts of education problems. We try to use them like little portable computers. We worry about printing. We lock down access to certain apps and information. We don’t provide emails to kids. We block server ports that allow the iPad to talk with iPads and devices. We limit who can install apps and when they can install them.

And we end up using the tool in a way that’s not good for kids. We need to see the iPad as a problem that forces us to re-think how we view school.

If you agree with this sort of thinking, and it does make sense to me, then it’s not just iPads that are the problem. It’s all kinds of disruptive ideas. It’s the new Kansas social studies standards that focus on process rather than just content. It’s the new national social studies framework. It’s research-based practices that we know are good for kids but we don’t use because the system limits their effectiveness.

Jen Carey live-blogged Greg’s preso and quoted Justin Reich:

Technology doesn’t magically change teacher’s practice. You can have students use iPads in much the same way that they once used slate boards. But what new technologies like tablets or laptops can do is open new avenues for conversation. In schools where every child has a portable, multimedia creation device, what can we do differently? What is possible now that wasn’t possible before?

This should lead to some interesting conversations about how iPads can best be used in our social studies classrooms.

I often talk about the 4 Cs:

• collect
• collaborate
• create
• communicate

as a way to organize social studies instruction. We provide an authentic problem for kids to solve. Kids collect information that addresses the problem. They work together to create a solution to the problem and communicate the solution to others outside the classroom.

More and more mobile tools are being created that can support this sort of instruction. And Greg’s right. It’s a problem. A problem that can push us to change how we do school.

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