Top Ten Posts of 2016 #1: 3D History: Exploring the World with Virtual Reality & Google Cardboard

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, 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 the top ten History Tech posts of 2016. Enjoy the reruns. See you in a couple of weeks!

---

 

There’s nothing quite like being part of several thousand social studies teachers – all hanging out together in Washington D.C at the #NCSS2016 conference. It doesn’t get much better than spending four days chatting about history and best practice and tech integration and resources and geography and civics and econ while spending the evenings at the new Smithsonian African American museum, the Newseum, and the National Portrait Gallery.

And getting the chance to lead a couple of conference sessions – one of them with Kansas Council for the Social Studies president and superstar middle school teacher Kori Green? Icing on the cake.

Kori has been using the Google Expeditions app and Cardboard VR viewers with her kids this fall semester. Together we shared her experiences and a few other suggestions for classroom use. For those of you not able to make our session, I’ve posted some of the conversation and a few additional resources here for whoever might find them useful.

History Nerdfest 2016: Ten Tech Tools for Teaching Social Studies

I had the chance to drop in on a quick 30 minute Power session that focused on ten tech tools for teaching civics. Three minutes of overview for each tool and a bit of fast discussion on how it might be used.

NewsELA
A site that allows users to read current event articles at different Lexile levels/ They also have a new section that does the same thing for primary sources – perfect for modifying documents to make them more accessible.

Twitter
Presenters shared a series of hashtags that social studies teacher can follow:

• tlap
• sstlap
• sschat
• whapchat
• hsgovchat
• pyschat
• worldgeochat

I would also suggest using a curating tool such as HootSuite or TweetDeck to help sort and organize the information that will come pouring in while following this hashtags.

History Nerdfest 2016 Day Two: Strategies to Engage Students in Sourcing Content

Okay. The title had already pulled me in but any session that’s playing the Hamilton soundtrack as you enter the room is destined to be awesome.

Ashley and Brian Furgione are talking this afternoon about ways to encourage and support different ways of sourcing evidence. Yes, they are married. And both are middle school teachers and teach US History / Civics in Florida.

They started with the question:

How can we help engage kids in using primary sources and asking great sourcing questions?

And shared some examples:

History Nerdfest 2016 Day One: Learning to Look with the National Portrait Gallery

I flew into Washington yesterday afternoon and had a few hours to kill before the Nerdfest kicked off and so had the chance to visit a couple of the DC museums – I spent a few hours at the International Spy Museum and a couple of hours at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Never been to the Spy Museum, a little cheesy but still interesting. (To give you an idea, if you’ve never had the chance, it has a whole floor dedicated just to James Bond villians.)

The National Portrait Gallery? So cool. Seriously. Three huge floors of . . . well, mostly portraits. But other artwork and photographs and famous people and Civil War images and basically America from start to the present through the eyes of artists. (To give you an idea, the famous painting of Alexander Hamilton is. Right. Over. There.)

I’ve been before to the NPG before and stood there looking at all of this history, thinking to myself

How can social studies teachers use this?

Thanks to the last session of Day One and Briana White, now I know. As the manager of Teacher Programs at the National Portrait Gallery, Briana knows how social studies teachers can use all of that history.

She started by sharing the mission of the NPG:

3D History: Exploring the world with Virtual Reality & Google Cardboard

There’s nothing quite like being part of several thousand social studies teachers – all hanging out together in Washington D.C at the #NCSS2016 conference. It doesn’t get much better than spending four days chatting about history and best practice and tech integration and resources and geography and civics and econ while spending the evenings at the new Smithsonian African American museum, the Newseum, and the National Portrait Gallery.

And getting the chance to lead a couple of conference sessions – one of them with Kansas Council for the Social Studies president and superstar middle school teacher Kori Green? Icing on the cake.

Kori has been using the Google Expeditions app and Cardboard VR viewers with her kids this fall semester. Together we shared her experiences and a few other suggestions for classroom use. For those of you not able to make our session, I’ve posted some of the conversation and a few additional resources here for whoever might find them useful.

This is a short list. Have some of your own goodness to share? Post ’em in the comments.

General resources