Contextualize Your Learning

If you, like I am, are teaching this summer, you might want to consider using a site I have been helping to develop.  About a year ago I jumped at the chance to work with a Palo Alto based group that wanted to contextualize learning.  The thought behind our work is that we learn most items in a vacuum and do not make connections between items.  So we decided that to learn better we need to have four relations 1) a timeline 2) a mapped location 3) cause and effect 4) relationship (connection) to other like groups/people.  Each of our "nodes" (people/place/things, etc.) also comes with a 150 word description.

So if you go to ContextU, you can see our 60 nodes that cover everything you need to know for the Civil War.  Later we will have all of US and then world history.

Our model has four levels; middle school, high school, college and "scholar" that allow you to see more or less of the mater.  You can also set it up for your class or just yourself.   You can also bypass the teacher/student role and just hit the "enter" button.

If you have feedback, there is a button for that or feel free to e-mail me.  Likewise if you want to send it to friends there is a way you can do it on via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.