Tip of the Week – LiveBinders and Social Studies

It was another great day at MACE yesterday. Learning and presenting and conversing and snacking. Perhaps one of the best conferences ever.

I had the chance to sit in a session by Curtis Allen from Spring Hill HS. Titled History Through LiveBinders, I had to go check it out.

If you haven’t messed with LiveBinders, you really need to. In a nutshell? LiveBinders is the online, virtual equivalent of the old fashioned three-ring binder that we all have cluttering up our bookshelves. You can store websites by tabs, share them, annotate them, edit them in lots of different ways. Basically, LiveBinders is a place where all of your online stuff can be stored.

The cool thing is that what you store appears in a frame below your list of stuff. This lets you view content without losing sight of your links.

According to Curtis,

It’s a one-stop shop for your students. It stores websites and annotations that’s accessible anywhere/anytime.

To get started, go to the LiveBinders site and create a free account.

What can it do?

• It has the ability to let Google “fill” a binder based on your keywords.
• You can select Present mode (full screen) that is useful for highlighting content while doing whole-group instruction.
• LiveBinders allows you to add your own documents, pdfs, and YouTube videos.
• You can create binders that allow collaboration between users.
• The tool has a bookmarklet feature that lets you add websites quickly without opening the LiveBinders website.
• You can look at the other public binders and so get ideas from other teachers.
• They have created a list of top ten public binders.
• There is a brand new iPad app that provides the chance to access binders using mobile devices.

Have fun!

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?

 

Edutopia – Six Tips for Brain-Based Learning

Edutopia always has great stuff. Every once in a while, they’ll put out a teacher’s guide to help us do our job better. A recent guide focuses on ways to help you integrate brain-based strategies into your instruction.

In this resource guide, you’ll get practical tips across the K-12 spectrum, a reading list, and a variety of resources to help you learn more about this fascinating field. To help you and your students learn more about their own brain power, they’ve also included a bonus project that will get students thinking critically about how they learn.

What’s Inside the PDF?

1. Create a Safe Climate for Learning
2. Encourage a Growth Mind-set
3. Emphasize Feedback
4. Get Bodies and Brains in Gear
5. Start Early
6. Embrace the Power of Novelty
7. Bonus Project: Build a Brain Owner’s Manual
8. Recommended Reading

You’ll get specific strategies, tons of resources, lots of links, and useful suggestions. I especially like the recommended reading list.

Productive stupidity

Do you ever feel stupid?

For some of us, the feeling can be a daily occurrence so I’ll re-phrase the question.

Do you ever feel stupid . . . on purpose?

Because if you haven’t purposefully gone out of your way to feel stupid, I’m gonna suggest that you’re not doing your job correctly. Give me a minute. It’ll make sense eventually.

I ran across an article last week that talked about the importance of being stupid while doing science research. The author describes how very bright science students, successful in high school and college, fail miserably in graduate programs. They’re used to memorizing the answers and acing the tests. When they have to generate their own questions and solve previously unsolved problems, they feel stupid and quit.

Basically the author says that being stupid is not necessarily a bad thing – he describes it as “productive stupidity”:

We don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m not talking about “relative stupidity,” in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.

While the article is concerned with science students, I see a lot of parallels in history teachers. I think a lot of us did great in high school and college. We enjoy history so it was easy to memorize stuff and spit it back out. The problem is that when we get in the classroom, we stop learning.

As a group, it seems as if most social studies teachers don’t read history books. Don’t watch documentaries. Don’t take history classes. Don’t take advantage of free training and learning opportunities. And I think that we don’t because it can make us feel stupid.

My question is pretty simple:

Are you working to be productively stupid? Are you ignorant by choice?

Over the last year, I’ve had the chance to work with 40 middle school American history teachers in a Teaching American History project. There’s a lot of experience and content knowledge in the room. But they have all purposefully chosen to be a part of the project to learn more by being productively stupid.

They ask great questions. They struggle with problems. They share ideas. And by admitting that they are “stupid,” they are becoming smarter, better teachers of history.

It’s okay to be stupid. Admitting it is the first step to recovery.

Tip of the Week – Teaching with movies

I posted my favorite movies the other day.

And, yes, I’m probably encouraging the stereotype of social studies teachers / coaches showing movies every week so that they can read the newspaper, break down game film, or drink coffee. But I will always argue that appropriate use of video clips and movies is great for kids.

So some resources to help break the stereotype:

Teaching History has some great articles and suggestions for using movies in your instruction. What Do Students Learn from Historical Feature Films provides information about how you can help kids analyze historical videos as historians. Teaching with Historical Film Clips provides a useful list for creating a lesson plan that integrates movie clips.

The people at Truly Moving Pictures also have a couple of handy tools. The first is a nice PDF guide for parents and educators that provides suggestions for activating positive emotions during viewing. They also have extensive curriculum guides for a variety of feel-good movies. Not all would work in a social studies classroom but there several such as The Express and Glory Road that could be used.

A great book is Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies. Great Films and How to Teach Them is another one.

There are lots of other useful tools out there. Check out these resources for more ideas and suggestions:

• Teach With Movies
• The Past in Motion: Teaching with Movies
• Historical Movies in Chronological Order
• History in the Movies
• Modern Era history movies
• Ancient Era history movies
• Hollywood’s Best History Movies
• Historical Federal Government Films
• PBS American Experience Films
• Teach with Movies
• How to Use Hollywood Films in the Social Studies Classroom
• Teaching with Historical Film Clips

Have fun!

10 movies every social studies teacher should see

Okay, I lied.

I started off with the idea that I could create a short little list of my ten favorite social studies related movies. But I was wrong. As I started thinking about great history movies and talking with others, the list grew quickly. And I couldn’t narrow it down to just ten. Then it got worse. This month’s Social Education journal showed up in my mailbox with their movie list.

So.

Things have changed. I created a list of my ten favorite history movies, a list of other history movies, and another list of great feel-good teacher movies. The criteria for inclusion on the list is pretty simple – if the movie appears while channel surfing, it takes control of the remote and must be watched through the credits.

Enjoy.

My favorites in no particular order:

• Band of Brothers
  Yes, technically a mini-series. But I love the story of Dick Winters and the others who were a part of Easy Company.
• Glory
  Robert Gould Shaw leads the US Civil War’s first all-black volunteer company, fighting prejudices of both his own Union army and the Confederates.
• Gettysburg
  Based on the book The Killer Angels, this is a long movie but it does a good job of depicting weapons, tactics, and beliefs during the Civil War.
• Schindler’s List
  Based on the true story of Oskar Schindler who managed to save about 1100 Jews from being gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. A testament for the good in all of us.
• The Help
  Unlikely friendships, empowerment, and the 1960s segregated South. What else do you need for a great story?
• All the President’s Men
  Not as detailed as the book but easier to follow, this is basically a documentary about the Bill of Rights.
• 1776
  Yes. It’s a musical. But a funny, fairly historically accurate musical.
• The Mission
  Perhaps the best I’ve ever seen for depicting European colonization and expansion.
• Hotel Rwanda
  Danger. Bravery. Evil. Courage. This story of genocide exposes both the good and bad in people.
• Gandhi
  An awesome story depicting human courage fighting for human rights against the machine of British colonialism.

Other great history movies

• Saving Private Ryan
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
• The Last of the Mohicans
• Dances with Wolves
• Mississippi Burning
• The Boy in Striped Pajamas
• Gladiator
• Braveheart
• Letters from Iwo Jima
• To Kill A Mocking Bird
• Memphis Belle
• Dr. Strangelove
• Amistad

Feel-Good Teacher Movies

• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
  As social studies teachers, this is about the best non-example I can think of. Plus, well . . . it’s hilarious.
• The Freedom Writers
  Teaching tolerance and grading tons of papers is not easy.
• Dead Poet’s Society
  Captain, my captain. Emotional connections to content make all the difference.
• October Sky
  Perseverance and supportive teachers can change lives.
• Stand and Deliver
  This is a great movie about reaching students who feel like they have no hope of success in their life.
• Teachers
  “Half of these kids aren’t coming back.” “Yeah. But the other half is.” Best line ever.
• School of Rock
  Differentiated instruction and Jack Black. Enough said.
• Searching for Bobby Fischer
  Pushy parents and pushy teachers are not always the best thing for bright kids.
• The Emperor’s Club
  I like the interaction between teacher and students. And the teacher’s concern for quality.
• Akeelah and the Bee
  There are all sorts of ways to learn and to make friends.

What would you add to the list? What you would delete?