Race to Ratify is latest awesome iCivics game that you should be playing right now.

I got the chance over the last few days to spend time with tons of social studies gurus and learn tons of new stuff at the National Council for History Education conference in Washington DC. Thanks to Dr. Richard Satchwell and Judy Bee at Illinois State University and all the folks at the @TeachingLC Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources project for making the trip possible.

Part of our TPS time together was spent with developers of the five Library of Congress interactive civic education apps they’ve created. Very cool stuff that you can find at the LOC. All five are super handy for helping kids make sense of primary sources and for training students to engage as informed citizens. It was great sitting with the developers and learning more about how to use the apps with kids.

But I am just as excited about something Emma Humphries, Chief Education Officer at iCivics, threw out at the end of her formal presentation about their DBQuest app:

We’re releasing a new iCivics game tomorrow called Race to Ratify.

She couldn’t really share a ton about it but we got the chance to get a quick taste of the game. And when she said “tomorrow,” she meant last Friday. So it’s been officially out in the wild for a few days. I’ve played with it a bit since then and it’s pretty much like all iCivics content.

Awesome.

iCivics: The bacon of social studies

I like bacon.

Bacon cheeseburgers. Eggs and bacon. BLTs. Chocolate covered bacon. Maple and bacon doughnuts. Bacon and onion gravy. Bacon topped baked potatoes. Bacon wrapped Little Smokies. Bacon wrapped anything.

I’m probably not the only one. And I get it . . . some choose not to eat bacon for religious or health reasons. (And have much stronger will power than I do.)

My point? Pretty much everything is better with bacon.

So what’s the bacon of social studies? That one thing that goes better with everything and is so delicious that you really need to find a way to integrate it into your classroom? The answer is simple.

Using STEM in the Social Studies: Taking action

Scott Noet and Kim Gilman (my good buddy from Shawnee, Kansas) met as Goethe TOP Fellows several years ago. And now they’re partnering up to share some of their best ideas about how to move students from analysis to action using STEM activities.

Kim says that we spend a ton of time focusing on helping kids to perfect their analysis skills. Nothing wrong with that. But we can’t forget that we also need to be helping kids take action – to actually using their analysis skills to make the world a better place.

I especially love a couple of things they shared:

Creating both great producers and consumers of information

I’m in snowy and snowing Minnesota at its annual Council for the Social Studies conference. We’re sheltered inside the state History Center – what better place for a bunch of social studies teachers?

First session is right up my alley. Strengthening democracy by training kids to be better users of social media and online tools. Jennifer Bloom from the Learning Law and Democracy Foundation is helping us create socially responsible and informed citizens. The Foundation hosts the Teaching Civics website – a cool place with over 800 lesson plans. They also have some handy ed resources.

As we get better at training kids to be engaged and informed citizens, she says

Teaching Toolkit: 9 resources for discussing the government shutdown

As a poly sci junkie, I’m torn.

The 2018 government shutdown is bad for just about everybody. And it seems like it happened over something that most Americans want to see happen – protection for Dreamers. A Fox News poll says 86% of us support DACA. A CBS poll reports 87% supporting the idea.

But the shutdown does create an opportunity to jump into all sorts of conversations involving civics and procedure and policy and elections and checks and balances and three branches and  media bias . . . well, you get the idea. If you haven’t already, this week might be a good time to jump ship on your scheduled curriculum and spend some time making connections to the government side of the social studies.

Need a few quick resources?

Tip of the Week: 32 New SHEG Civic Literacy Teaching Tools

We all love the Stanford History Education Group. What’s not to like? You get incredible lessons aligned to the NCSS C3 standards. And for us Kansas folks, they aligned perfectly to our state standards. They great for training kids to use evidence, think historically, and develop arguments with evidence.

You get powerful assessments that they call HATs – historical assessments of thinking. Short and sweet, easy to use, summative and formative assessments that help you measure a student’s ability to use evidence, think historically, and develop arguments with evidence.

Yup. The two go hand in glove. Tools for teaching and tools for assessing social studies process skills.

And if you’re not using these two free tools . . . might I suggest you head over and take a look? Cause your brain is about to be blown. Seriously. This is a non-negotiable tool that every history teacher should be using. Cause even if you don’t use their lessons, they’re great as models for your own lessons. And be sure to steal all of their modified primary sources.

So we’ve got super awesome lessons, assessments, lesson support all coordinated by Sam Wineburg – historical thinking guru and all around history teaching genius.

But SHEG just got better.

Yup. Better.