World War II: My teachers' toolkit of the best online resources (Part One)

I'm concentrating on two topics with my students during my unit on World War Two: how technology impacted the war, and how the war impacted four social groups.  This post will concentrate on the technology; I'll write about the social groups later.

As a general introduction, though, I'm first having my students watch a selection from the extraordinarily valuable series of 13 short videos called Teachable Moments that was produced by the FDR Library.   Each student watches four videos on her/his smartphone.  The student takes notes on a blank sheet of paper divided with a large diamond in the center.  The diamond itself is divided into four triangles.  Each sheet will look something like this (sorry about the graphic!).

Notes for each of the four assigned videos will go in a different triangle.  Then the students look for students who watched other videos and share what they learned.  (No copying!  Just listening and note taking.)

For the technology component, we're going to discuss the atomic bomb and the Enigma machine.  In this video (1:24) from the Newseum, Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay pilot, describes his mission.  The bomb's devastation is also shown.

 In this video (1:21) President Truman announces the bombing and explains its power.

This video (2:32) explains the Enigma machine and how British codebreakers led by Alan Turing broke it.  

This video (2:26) shows how an Enigma machine worked.

For the atomic bomb, my favorite online print resources are from the Truman Library (link is to primary sources), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (link is to an analysis with alternatives), and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (click on Search by Topic).

For the Enigma machine, my favorite online print resources are from Bletchley Park (home to the British codebreakers), the BBC, and the Imperial War Museums.

My First Storify Assignment

I just completed my first Storify assignment.

Storify creates online presentations.  It's great because it is free, easy to use, and the presentations you make look terrific.  To make your Storify you simply

• Write your headline (the topic of your presentation)
• Write a description of your headline
• Add content.  The content can be from anything you can find on the web, so you can include material from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Once you assemble your content, you can introduce, explain, and describe the content in text boxes.

The assignment that I wrote for my students concerns the social impact of World War II on four social groups (Japanese-Americans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Women).  You can read my assignment here.

Rosa Parks: A new terrific (and timely!) resource

Rosa Parks's arrest on 1 December 1955 in Montgomery, AL, for refusing to move to the back of a city transit bus was a seminal event in the Civil Rights Revolution.  Of course we devote time to her story in our classes.

Good news: The Library of Congress announced today that it has fully digitized its collection of the Rosa Parks Papers.  In addition to thousands of images and written works, the collection contains a useful timeline of Mrs. Parks's life.

Better news: The Library had complemented the new digitized collection with a primary source gallery for teachers.  The teachers' gallery includes pdf versions of 15 primary sources.  My favorite item was Mrs. Parks's four-page handwritten recollection of her bus arrest.  She starts by answering the obvious question directly--Why did she choose that night to defy segregation?  Her answer was poignant, heartfelt, and direct: "I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore."

Also powerful is her handwritten description of segregation in Montgomery.  This is actually the document I would use with my students first.  Assign it to them to read, and then ask them to list the ways in which one southern town practiced segregation during the Jim Crow era.

Best news: This resource is available now, as we start planning to study the origins of the Civil Rights Movement with our students.

How fast is fast?

Fast is a relative term.  In our U.S. History classes, one theme we trace is the development of new transportation technologies, from the National Road (then through the Erie Canal, Transcontinental Railroad, urban subways, cars, and airplanes) to space ships.

I just read about a great source to show our students to help illustrate this theme.  It poses a simple question (How far could you go on one day of travel from New York City?) and illustrates the answer in a map.

In 1800, a traveller would be hard pressed to get much farther south than Philadelphia or much past New Haven to the north in a day.  Antebellum New Yorkers near the eve of the Civil War could get to Maine or Cleveland.  Air travel helped the travel savvy New Yorker get past the Rockies by Black Tuesday and to the Pacific Ocean just a few years later.

Classroom connection: It would be fun to show your students this map, and ask them to research examples of primary sources describing what early transportation was like for these stagecoach, rail, and air pioneers.  Other students could look for advertisements offering travel on these new carriers.  A third group could investigate the impact these new transportation technologies had on different social and economic groups.

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I learned about this map in a terrific post today (while following the New York Public Library's Division of U.S. History, Local History & Genealogy) by Dana Schulz (@danaschulzNYC) in the 6sqft blog.  Dana's post was based on a post in Quartz by David Yanofsky (@YAN0) (NB: That last character is the number zero).  Thanks to both Dana and David!

BrainRush is back online!

It's okay, we can exhale.  BrainRush, the adaptive learning site, is back online.  

I've blogged about BrainRush previously, and why it's my favorite online study and review platform.   BrainRush lets you create four different types of activities: matching (like for vocabulary flash cards), buckets (for sorting), chronologies (for sequencing), or hot spots (for labeling a diagram or map).  BrainRush practices with the students until they achieve mastery.

There are two things that make BrainRush so special.  First, questions get progressively more challenging, so it really does help students demonstrate mastery.  Second, the BrainRush questions adapt to each individual student's level of knowledge.  If a student answers incorrectly, then the student is given additional guided practice for that fact.

BrainRush activities are easy to create.  And now that it's back online, I'll be creating more activities for my students right away.

Teacher's Toolkit for Great Depression and the New Deal

I just finished blogging about the best videos (the Teachable Moments series from the FDR Presidential Library) to use when teaching the Great Depression and the New Deal.  Here are the other resources I will be using to work with my students this week.

"Radical Responses to the Great Depression," a website from the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library, is a great introduction to the social aspects of the era.  It has artifacts and commentary exploring topics like criticism from the radical left and conservative right, labor strikes and violence, the case of the Scottsboro Boys, and the social cost of unemployment and hunger.

The Supreme Court Historical Society has produced an excellent series of 10 short videos on FDR and the Court-Packing Controversy.  The videos provide concise commentary on the context (the New Deal and judicial opposition to FDR's programs), the Court-Packing proposal, reaction and debate on the proposal, and its eventual withdrawal.

This feature from the Library of Congress includes commentary and artifacts describing the impact the Great Depression and New Deal had on African Americans.

Finally, this 2008 story ("A Depression-Era Anthem For Our Times") from NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday looks at the song "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" to consider why it has been considered the anthem of the Great Depression.

Bread line in New York City, 1929

The best videos on the Great Depression

The FDR Presidential Library has a set of 14 short videos (shortest: 2:19; longest: 3:29) discussing different aspects of the Great Depression.  The playlist is called Teachable Moments: The New Deal, and it is the best single video resource to use with your students.  Here is the introductory video:

And here is a list of the other 13 titles in this series:

1. What caused the Great Depression?
2. The Promise of Change
3. Worsening Crisis
4. Emergency Legislation: The Bank Holiday
5. The First 100 Days
6. Reaching the People
7. Social Security
8. Jobs and Relief
9. Labor Reforms
10. Financial Reforms
11. Rural Reforms
12. The Dust Bowl
13. New Deal Setbacks

Classroom Connections: I'm going to assign my students to watch and take notes on one video on their personal devices.  They will then prepare an infographic with explanatory commentary describing their topic.  We will put the infographics around the classroom and students will participate in a gallery walk.  As students walk through the classroom and discuss their topic, they will tweet what they learned to a common hashtag.

A powerful primary source from a former slave

Just four months after Lee's surrender at Appomattox,  and during the time between Congressional passage and ratification of the 13th Amendment, a Tennessee Confederate general wrote to Jourdan, his emancipated slave now living in Ohio, and asked him to return back to his old slave master's farm.  Jourdan's response is the most powerful primary source describing the horrors of slavery that I have every read.  Using it with your students will be a powerful tool to help understand them the harsh realities of slavery in the era before the Civil War.

The letter is addressed "To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson."  It is such an effective document because it shows clearly how wary Jourdan is about Col. Anderson, and the reasons for it.  Anderson had shot Jourdan twice, and had abused his daughters.  As Jourdan explains, "I would rather stay here and starve -- and die, if it come to that -- than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters."

Despite this appalling history, Jourdan is still open to returning, if Col. Anderson would agree to pay Jourdan and his wife the wages for their years of labor and if schools open to black children were available in Tennessee.

Ask your students to read this letter and look for examples of how slaves were treated in the south during the antebellum era.  Then lead them in a discussion of how the relationship between master and former slave changed after the Civil War.  Have them speculate: If you were Col. Anderson, how would you respond to Jourdon's letter?  This is an excellent resource that would yield important insights about slavery and a lively classroom conversation.

My thanks to my teaching colleague George Coe for sending me this link. 

My first FlipQuiz

I just built my first FlipQuiz!  I like it a lot and am eager to share it with my students on Monday.

FlipQuiz is a review game that presents questions in a Jeopardy format.

There are certainly other similar products for review games, but I liked FlipQuiz's easy-to-use question templates, the way it accepts pictures, and the extremely large font-size when questions and answers are displayed.  While I don't go in for games that much, I recognize their value to review and as a formative assessment tool.

My first FlipQuiz is on the 1920s.  I presented that lesson last week (using @nearpod, which I still absolutely love).  How much do my students remember?  I'll find out on Monday, which gives me a chance to remediate, and my students to self-assess what they need to do to prepare for their quiz on that decade later next week.

You can take a look at my first FlipQuiz by clicking here.

Terrific blog post on Jim Crow photographs from the Library of Congress

Please check this terrific blog post by Jeff Bridgers from the Library of Congress describing the Jim Crow era and highlighting the Library's unparalleled collection in this area.

Titled, "Signs of Their Times: 'Jim Crow' Was Here," the short post features a concise definition of Jim Crow laws and the two Supreme Court cases that framed that era (Plessy v. Ferguson [1896] and Brown v. Board of Education [1954]), then shows four representative photographs documenting how "various facilities (were) for the exclusive use of one race."

Photograph by Russell Lee, July 1939, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a26761

The blog concludes with a great list of links for further study.

Classroom Connection: Assign this blog post to your students as background reading.  Then direct them to the further study links and ask them to create a presentation answering this question: "How deeply rooted was racial segregation during the Jim Crow era?"  This will guide them to find examples of separate facilities in a host of activities.

BrainRush: Network connectivity problems?

The BrainRush website hasn't been functioning for over 24 hours.  It's been a very frustrating 24 hours!  Instead of opening to this...

a user sees this:

No news on the @gobrainrush Twitter feed.  So the activities I created for my students using their terrific site are, for now, suspended.

The 1920s: Two terrific primary source sets

I've just found two terrific primary source sets to use with my students while studying the 1920s.

The first set is part of the America in Class series from the National Humanities Center and is titled "Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s."

One section of that series is titled "Divisions," and it has well-curated sets of primary sources addressing these groups/conflicts:

1. KKK
2. Black and White
3. City and Town
4. Wets and Drys
5. Religion and Science
6. Labor and Capital
7. Native and Foreign
8. "Reds" and "Americans"

Each of the sets include pdf reprints of newspaper commentary, cartoons, and speeches.  What I like best about these reprints is that the cartoons are published on full sheets of paper, making considering all the detail that much easier.  This 1923 cartoon (caption: One Must Be Extinguished) shows the Statue of Liberty with two outstretched arms.  One arm is labeled "Liberty" and holds the torch of Democracy.  The other arm, labeled KKK, holds the fiery cross of racial hatred.

The sources also have excellent introductions that guide your students as they consider how to decode the documents.

The second set was produced as a joint project spearheaded by the California History-Social Science Project of the University of California, Irvine.  

This set, titled, "Red Scare! The Palmer Raids and Civil Liberties," begins with a short Teacher's Guide and Historical Background, a glossary, timeline, and then includes political cartoons and primary and secondary sources.  Each source is followed by a well-written series of questions to guide students to discover the main idea and pertinent details.  What I like best about this set is that it is a well-developed and comprehensive integrated unit unto itself.

A premium, fee-based version of Socrative? (But don't worry)

Socrative is a great tool, and it's making plans right now to get better.

With Socrative you can write quiz questions, quick questions (T/F or short answer), and really cool review games for your students.  I use it a lot and my students love it (especially the Space Race game).

Now they're thinking of offering new services, such as expanding the maximum classroom size from 50 to 150 students, exporting results to gradebooks, and delivering multiple activities to multiple rooms simultaneously (that one sounds like it would be great for synchronous classroom vs. classroom competitions).

I just received an email from Socrative today asking if I would be willing to pay $29.99/year for these new planned premium services.  Not to worry: They reassure users that Socrative's existing core features will remain free.

Hamilton: The Musical

We can't get tickets to see this Broadway blockbuster (it's sold out until forever), but here's the opening number (3:14) from last night's Grammy broadcast:

Chills, right?

My Harlem Renaissance project

We study the Harlem Renaissance as part of our unit on the 1920s.  It's a great opportunity to introduce our students to how poetry can be an important cultural artifact, and explore how culture can reveal aspects of the African-American experience during that decade.

My project involves students reading four poems of that era.  Everyone reads the Langston Hughes poem "A Dream Deferred" because I'm biased: It's the single most powerful poem I ever read.  It literally stopped me in my tracks when I first read it!  That poem, and all the other poems, are in a handout of Harlem Renaissance poetry I compiled for them.  After reading their poems, students have to complete four tasks and display them on a poster board.

Click here to see my Harlem Renaissance project.  The files (handout and readings) are at the bottom of the page.