The Making of the US Constitution

I found this on TedEd on the making of the US Constitution.  

For Students, Why the Question is More Important Than the Answer

The authors of Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions, think Socrates was all wrong. Instead of using questions to get kids to think more deeply, Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, the authors and co-directors of The Right Question Institute, argue that we should ask the student to come up with the questions that speak to the core of a topic. They want us to flip the Socratic method on its head.

Here's what they say about their method: “What happens is the teacher plays a different role,” Santana said. “They lead students into thinking. The process of teaching students to ask their own questions allows teachers to communicate what they need to around curriculum. The difference is that the students are thinking and doing more, rather than the teacher.”  They offer some interesting ways to to begin the process.

Tell a Story with QR Codes

The blog, Instructional Design Fusions, has an interesting story on how to use QR Codes in the classroom. The video above is a bit long and takes a minute or so to get used to the accent, but you'll get the general idea after a couple of minutes. It's got me thinking how I might use QR codes in world history.

Helen Keller

This is a fascinating look at Helen Keller.  You can see both her teacher "speaking" to her as well as see her "listening" to music.  It is a fascinating look at the woman who believed that that her limitations were not that at all.  I found this on Open Culture.  

FakeTweet Assignment

Andrea Parent is a fellow social studies chair and a teacher-student in my class learning to integrate technology into the classroom.  She just made this very nice assignment for her students using FakeTweet.  You could copy it and completely change the assignment to match your needs as it has a link to a great how-to video (made by a former student of mine) as well as an example of her FakeTweet and, of course, a link to the FakeTweet maker. 

Easy and Noodle Bibs

So last night my oldest daughter was working on her timeline on Richard Nixon and she said she had to citations for her pictures.  She started to login to her Blackboard site to go to the MLA maker site.  Instead I had her Google "MLA maker" and we found EasyBib which allowed her to just put in the website for the picture and come up with the citation.  Of course it also allowed her to put in an author and all of his/her books came up.  Magazines, interviews, etc. are also out there.

If you want a free site for MLA, APA or the Chicago methods of having citations then NoodleBib is free and here.  

War on Film from The UK National Archives

The UK National Archives, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II created a series called "War on Film" in which military records specialist, William Spencer, "explores the true stories behind popular war films and uses original records to depict actual events." The clips are all less than five minutes each, like the one above, deconstructs one of the war films like The Great Escape, The Man Who Never Was, Hope and Glory, and Carve Her Name with Pride. Thanks to my colleague, Jeff Feinstein, for sending me the link.

Art Catalogs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met has uploaded hundreds of art catalogs which you can read online or download as PDFs. Here are some of the titles which I copied directly from Open Culture's posting about the catalogs. The catalogs span both world and US history.

• Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain
• American Art Posters of the 1890s in The Metropolitan Museum of Art 
• Degas: The Artist’s Mind 
• Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library Masterpieces of The Metropolitan Museum of Art 
• The Art of IlluminationVermeer and the Delft SchoolWisdom Embodied: 
• Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art 
• Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting 

Getting More Out of an Essay

One of the most frustrating exercises I have had as a teacher has been to get my non AP students to write essays.  First off, I have to hear the line, "This isn't an English class."  Secondly so many students simply do not write their essays, instead choosing to take the grade hit.  Well I believe I finally have found a successful way to get the kids to write essays.

1. Help the students find background information by setting up categories for the students or even asking questions about documents if you are doing a DBQ.
2. Put students in groups and use Google Drive to share their background notes
3. Go over the fundamentals of writing and then have students write lots of the essay in class and share parts of it with the students
4. E-mail parents that the essays are due and use Remind101 to tell remind students that it is due. I even, this time, had students share the essays with partners so they could give feedback.
5. I made the essays due by 6 pm Sunday night and then put comments (note, no grade) all over everyone's essays.  When the students got to class I actually gave them a quiz on the main points of an essay (see #3) and then let the students look at my comments and then ask questions about it.
6. Let my many ESOL students write their essay in their native language and then translate using Google Translate. 
7. Then I told the kids they can fix my comments and share them with me using Google Drive by Wednesday.

The upshot is that almost all of my students wrote their essays and wrote a substantial number of points.  

Interactive Whiteboard with your Ipad

Doceri turns your Ipad into an interactive white board and screencast recorder. You can download a free trial but the real app costs $30. But it might be worth it. It allows you do what the Khan Academy teachers do, which is to annotate the presentation.  For example, lets say that you have an outline map of India and you want to explain the direction of the monsoon winds, you can actually draw arrows onto the whiteboard.

Doceri connects your laptop to your ipad.  You can project your laptop and control it from your Ipad.

Itunes U and History Courses

ITunes University (which you can download as an app) and access through ITunes on your laptop has scores of courses in history as well as in most other disciplines. Some of the courses (I found a couple in religion) with embedded video clips that were quite good. Some are worth exploring. You can also access K-12 listings. To find  ITunes U, open ITunes  and click on Itunes Store, then click the pull down menu on the last tab called ITunes U.

Google Drive Presentations

Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) has its own version of PowerPoints called Presentation.  Here is a tremendous e-sheet showing you everything you ever wanted to know in terms of using it.  Above is a video showing some of the cooler features of Google Drive Presentation. 

Explore a Google Data Center

If you want to control your walk through a data center, you can go here to a Street View panorama.  Thanks to a Tweet from Alex Couros for this video. 

FakeTweeting

One of the things I teach my teacher students is how to have their students create fake Tweet streams.  You can use it to have conversations between historical figures, add in pictures and generally make your students condense their comments to a very well thought out series of concise statements.  Above is a video made by one of the teachers in my course last year, Matt Levi.  The best part about this is that while you can set up an account, you do not need to and once you are done it gives you a unique url which your students could e-mail or put on a Google Drive document to share with their teacher.  

Clouds Over Cuba from The JFK Library

Fiftieth anniversaries create lots of material. This month the John F Kennedy Library released a new interactive documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis called Clouds over Cuba. This is the teaser for the documentary. As the documentary rolls, it asks the viewer to access their collection of documents and photographs.