Maybe, just maybe. Resources to support media literacy and civic engagement

Maybe. Just maybe.

Maybe it’s not that our students are gullible. It’s that they’re too cynical. Maybe it’s not that our students don’t believe in the facts. It’s that they don’t know who to trust. Maybe it’s not that our students can’t think critically. It’s that perhaps they’re thinking deeply while interacting with the wrong resources.

I get it. The events of the last few weeks support the idea that we need more social studies. More civics. More difficult and controversial conversations. (Especially at the elementary level.) Couldn’t agree more. We do need more social studies.

But I’ve been in a lot of classrooms and know a lot of great educators. There is already amazing social studies instruction happening in lots of places. So maybe we need to step back, take a breath, stop talking about requiring civic exams in order to graduate, and be more intentional about building on the good stuff that we all know is already there.

What might that look like?

The Week. It’s the 2019 version of our favorite Weekly Reader that your kids need

I spent the majority of my grade school years at Alta Brown Elementary School in Garden City, America, working on my three Rs. It was pretty traditional stuff – snacks every afternoon, keeping the metal slipper slide super slick with our waxed milk cartons, lots of math drills, straight rows of desks, and, of course, the very awesome Weekly Reader that showed up every Thursday.

Surely you haven’t forgotten the Weekly Reader.

For those of you who didn’t have that particular grade school experience, the Weekly Reader showed up, well . . . every week. Designed for elementary kids, it highlighted current events and always included interesting feature stories. And it was glorious. At least for a budding social studies nerd like me.

My memories were jogged a week or so ago when I ran across the

Tip of the Week: Bias, civic literacy, and historical thinking skills

Back when my youngest was in fourth grade, I asked her to preview the very cool You Are the Historian website. It’s an interactive tool that asks elementary kids to use historical thinking skills while addressing the site’s guiding question: What really happened at the first Thanksgiving?

The site led her through primary sources, to video clips of colonial historians, and to the exploration of different artifacts. After she was finished, I asked her what she learned by “playing” the game:

The past is what really happened. History is what we say happened.

I couldn’t have been prouder. That’s exactly what I hoped to hear. (And good job, BTW, You Are the Historian creators.)

History is our interpretation of evidence.

We have a problem. We look at evidence. And we figure it out. But I’m not always sure that we’re teaching our kids how to do that very well. Part of the problem is bias. We don’t always make it clear enough that everything we have our kids use to solve the problems we give them is biased.

And just as there is no such thing as unbiased primary evidence, there is no such thing as unbiased secondary evidence. All news, photos, media sites, books – it’s all biased.

Need a few examples?

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.

Best posts 2017: Fake news is why you exist. 12 tools that can help

I’m sure most of you are doing the same thing I’m doing right now. Spending time with family and friends, watching football, catching up on that book you’ve been dying to read, eating too much Chex Mix, and enjoying the occasional nap.

But if you need a break from all of the holiday cheer, we’ve got you covered. Between now and the first week in January, you’ll get a chance to re-read seven of the most popular History Tech posts from 2017. Enjoy the reruns. See you in a couple of weeks!

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Okay. Basic question.

“If I asked you to describe what you do every day as a social studies teacher, what would I hear?”

Let me rephrase that a bit.

“If I asked you to describe what you should be doing every day as a social studies teacher, what would I hear?”

Here’s my point. I think that we can get so caught up in the everyday that we sometimes forget why we exist. Grading papers. Taking roll. Going to meetings. Calling parents. Trying to keep middle school kids from setting things on fire. That’s a typical day in your life. I get that.

But I’m going to suggest today that we need to keep our eyes on the prize.

What’s the prize? Why do we exist?

Missing your Zaption? Try EdPuzzle

You may have already made the switch. If you have, quietly move along. You’re probably happy with EdPuzzle and there’s nothing to see here.

That leaves two kinds of people. Those of you still be looking for that perfect Zaption replacement. And those of you who never went down the Zaption road at all and have no idea what we’re talking about.

Quick recap:

At its most basic level, Zaption was a way for you to take a video clip from a variety of sources including YouTube, Vimeo clip, Khan Academy, and other educational video outlets and add interactive elements such as multiple choice questions, open response boxes, text, images, and drawings. Students responded to the elements you embedded. You tracked their responses using Zaption’s analytics feature. Everybody was happy.

You should have noticed the past verb tense going on. Zaption was a great tool for annotating videos and embedding formative / summative assessments tools into video clips. It was a great example of a push / pull edtech tool – giving teachers a way to push content and assessment out to students and a way for teachers to pull in work back from students.

But Zaption no longer exists, having sold out to something called Workday. No idea what Workday does but what it means for Zaption users is that a very cool tool won’t be available after September 30.

So.

If you’re a Zaption user who hasn’t found a Zaption replacement, I got you covered. And if you never used Zaption but the idea of integrating a very cool push / pull video annotation tool sounds like something you want to take out for a test drive, I’ve got you covered too.