History Tips From Three Educators

Wow do I like when teachers take control and set up their own collaborative teams beyond their own school borders to help each others' students.  Above is a great example of this where three great flipping teachers came together to create a video on a fun way to remember a number of US history facts.  Give it a try and assume, as I am, that this is the first of many in a series.  

Video Documentary Assignment

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Jen Carey.  She also has an Internet page called "Indiana Jen" which goes through a number of her assignments.  What I like about this post is that it goes through into detail how students can create their projects.  It even includes a way for students to know if a webpage they are using is a good one as well as the fact that kids need to write out their script before recording their screencast.

Above is an example of one of her students' work. 

Instagrok Mindmaps

American Civil War | Learn about American Civil War on instaGrok, the research engine

I have been using Instragrok for the past two years and am happy that it has really taken a big step upwards.  Instragrok sets up the connections between different items.  Above is a small example for the American Civil War.  What is really cool about Instragrok is that in addition to setting up a mind map, it also brings up websites, videos, images, concepts and you can even add notes.  You can also get a unique url that you could give your students, or they you.  

Parady Song of the American Revolution

My son Grant watched this at school.  It really does cover many of the many points leading up to the American Revolution and to a tune all your students will recognize. 

Entire US History Course for Free

The American Home Front (WWII) from Tom Richey

From time to time I like to look at who is following me on Twitter to see if I want to find them as well.  Well recently Tom Richey started following me and it turns out he has a very rich website which has a complete US History for both AP and honors that includes readings, worksheets and PowerPoints and gives you the ability to copy whatever you want.  

Mistakes that Changed History

My post yesterday was inspired by the video above and which talks about mistakes that changed history.  I particularly liked the one on Gavrilo Princip as I had incorrectly thought he had failed in the AM to kill Franz Ferdinand when, in fact, it was another co-conspirator. More to the point while it features Keith Hughes, it also brings in two newer people collectively known as That Was History that has both US and world history videos.  

Another Side of MLK, Jr.

One of the problems with our US textbooks is that there are too many facts and not enough stories which is why I enjoy using primary documents to teach US history.  But the video above is why it is nice to teach the last one hundred years because you can get some more personal narratives such as the clip above from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s driver as he moves around and shows you places that MLK drove that didn't make the history books. 

Misunderstanding History

I sense an assignment coming on or even an end of the year project if we can get beyond all of our snow days.  As I like to tell my students we study history in part of understand different cultures and to be able to better relate to people around the US and the world.  So why not have your students look at one misunderstanding and try to be a sleuth and figure out why we have accepted this falsehood as fact today.

Consider the fact that Paul Revere did not say "The British are coming."  To say such would be akin to saying "The Americans" were coming since we were all British (he said the "Regulars" were coming).  While we are at it why do we best remember Revere when he was the only one the Regulars captured that night while Dawes and Prescott did a better job of warning residents. But neither of the other two were memorialized in a Longfellow poem nor had physical items (pewter, pictures) to be stored by history.  While we are it, what about Revere's own work in calling the Boston Massacre a massacre and in copying someone else's work and claiming it to be his own!

What about the belief that Columbus proved the world was round which was patently false and had long been accepted otherwise.  The why we see it that way is a better question and most believe that Washington Irving was the conveyer of that falsehood.

Of course the tallest of tales is the one that says that Napoleon was a bully because he was short when the reality was he was average height for his time.

Here are a bunch of misperceptions that you can start with showing your students.

So imagine the assignment.  1) student has to find a misperception 2) explain how it got to be a misunderstanding which in of itself is good analysis 3) how, if it did change history.  While you are at it, watch the video above for some inspiration.  

The Virtues of Tammany Hall!

In light of Chris Christie's (R-NJ) rough politics and comparison to his nearby neighbor Tammany Hall, it might be interesting for your students to look at this editorial from the NY Times which while certainly looking at the bad side of it also spells out that Tammany Hall allowed in Jews into their clubhouses, women were leaders there long before they could vote, refused to impose its (good) values on the poor it helped and more.  The editorial reminds me that we can never let the facts in our history books be the end of the story.  

Flipped Classroom on CBS News

I love that CBS refers to the flipped classroom as a new way to teach, but at least they interview two of the pioneers - even if they don't go back to the true originators (for that you have to read my book!).  If you are flipping, think about it and watch the video to be convinced. 

Ben Franklin Timeline

This is a great new timeline on Ben Franklin's life.  It scrolls from left to right and back again and and then you can click on all of the dates.

PBS Learning has a ton of wonderful items on its amazing site for you to use in your class.  

Black Codes

If you watch this 2:40 video you will see how much more crazy black codes were than you have perhaps been teaching your students such as: a farmer could not walk besides a railroad, you could not speak loudly around white women and you could not sell the farm products after dark and more in the video.

There is also a video on the origins of black codes.

Here is a series of the actual code from Mississippi. 

Friday is the Last Day to Sign Up for my Tech Integration Course

Sorry to my regular blog readers outside of Fairfax County, but I love teaching my Academy Course and just wanted to remind people that tomorrow (Friday) is the last day to sign up.  So in case you are considering it (or haven't considered it yet):

I will be teaching the sixth version of my technology integration course with Fairfax County Public Schools this spring.  We will learn about such items as webquests, pacing your students individually using technology, flipping the classroom, using electronic textbooks, collaborating online, how to use Google Drive and lots more in a ten week course.  You can get more details here on page 42.  To sign up go to MyPLT (if you need help go to page 72) and put either the title or just a few words from the title or even e-mail me and I can add you to the class.  The deadline for signing up is January 17th.

The class will be on Thursdays from 4:30 to 7ish at Woodson.  It is free to FCPS employees, but if you live in the areas and are not in FCPS you can take it, but you have to pay for it (page 9).   If you have questions, please e-mail me at ken.halla@fcps.edu. 

SkyDrive Tutorial

So it would be fair to say that I prefer Google Drive over Microsoft's SkyDrive.  SkyDrive is the cloud based way to use Microsoft.  It is not as robust as Google Drive in that it does not have any apps you can add, nor can you run scripts and has less free space, but it has been growing in the last two years.  To start you have documents, excel, PowerPoint or one note to create and upload files from Microsoft Office.

Above is a fairly nice video on how to use SkyDrive. 

Digital Learning Day Post

Tomorrow the Alliance for Excellent Education, that started Digital Learning Day, is cross posting my thoughts on Digital Learning Day 2014 which I am also posting below.

Last year in my Digital Learning Day post for the Alliance for Excellent Education I said that "One day all of our students will have interactive lessons where the teacher will walk around the room connecting information, helping pupils do their work and making sure that the necessary learning is being done correctly and where appropriate, collaboratively.  Classes will be self paced and conclude with interactive assessments that measure students' ability to find and use resources to answer probing questions." 

Interesting what a year brings.  This spring I have a book coming out from Corwin Books talking about just what is printed above (something I had no idea about when I wrote the post).  I am also co-teaching, for the first time in my career, and doing it with an ESOL/World History I class.  Fully half of the kids have been in the US fewer than two years and all but a few of the students are either immigrants or ones who do not speak English at home.

To that end we have flipped every single lecture (nothing profound, but all less then ten minutes which you can see here) and have our students working at different paces.  One parent told me her daughter was looking at the videos and webpages and wondered why she hadn't been reading more of the book.  I told her we were using multiple modalities and the e-book was just one of the resources.  But that child has only been speaking English a few years and finds it helpful to over over each video several times.

We also proved to the kids a valuable lesson telling them on the most recent unit that no one would be allowed to take the test until the study guide was completely done.  Between our two classes twelve kids tested us and we pulled each one in the hall individually and called home asking that their child stay after school to take the test and then had them sit down to work on the study guide.  Guess what? The ESOL kids tied the test scores of the mainstream ones and all our students were EIGHTG percentage points over the school average for the test!

Why did that happen?  Well rather than waste student time on lecture based teaching we spent the entire unit (and by now my cooperating teacher and I have adjusted quite well to each other) walking around and working one on one with each student.  Furthermore we probably call up 1/3rd of the students on a given day to look at grades and even to have student-parent-teacher conferences in the hall to work out issues.  We also have added in several formative quizzes each uint and the kids can take them as many times as they want to raise their grades.  

Still Room in My Tech Integration Class

I will be teaching the sixth version of my technology integration course with Fairfax County Public Schools this spring.  We will learn about such items as webquests, pacing your students individually using technology, flipping the classroom, using electronic textbooks, collaborating online, how to use Google Drive and lots more in a ten week course.  You can get more details here on page 42.  To sign up go to MyPLT (if you need help go to page 72) and put either the title or just a few words from the title or even e-mail me and I can add you to the class.  The deadline for signing up is January 17th.

The class will be on Thursdays from 4:30 to 7ish at Woodson.  It is free to FCPS employees, but if you live in the areas and are not in FCPS you can take it, but you have to pay for it (page 9).  The class fills up quickly, so if you are interested I would sign up sooner rather than later.  If you have questions, please e-mail me at ken.halla@fcps.edu. 

Suffrage Video to tune of Bad Romance

So yes my daughters are the children of a history teacher, but they choose to show this to their friends at their sleepover birthday party last night AND all seven girls (yes my wife and I are crazy to have had that many for a sleepover!) watched and enjoyed it the entire way through.  If it it can hold six graders then your eleventh grade students will probably enjoy it and you could use it as a way to have them review key terms like suffrage and the steps that we taken to overcome women's inability to vote. 

What Makes a Great Teacher

After years of being an AP coordinator and department chair I still know if someone will generally make a great teacher in the first few minutes I meet them.  But explaining it is a bit harder.  Having said that I know while a number of teachers view this site, so do some students.  So the video above is for you or for those of you who want to reflect on your own teaching.  It is worth the five minutes to watch it.

Keith Hughes' video breaks it down into content knowledge, having a strong paradigm on learning, being authentic and having great human relationships.  I really like how he says if you do the last two discipline will take care of itself - coming from someone who thinks raising his voice and sending kids to the office doesn't have much impact and even can be a reward in some case!  Hughes But sums it up well by calling teaching "magic."  Do you have anything to add? 

Short Videos about the Industrial Revolution

Above is a short History Channel video on the Industrial Revolution and here is a series of other short ones on transportation, oil, the railroad and inventions of the age.  You could use them for a web quest or as examples of how students can make their own short, yet packed with facts videos. 

Reconstruction from John Green

I imagine you are now through the Civil War and might want to consider using John Green's video as an introduction or review of the Reconstruction period. 

School on a Snow Day

I will admit that I can't get away with this with all of my classes, but my AP Comparative (which is AP US Government and AP Comparative in one year) is a motivated bunch. So while today is our second snow day (actually a "cold day" since it is 5 degrees right now) we have managed to work around the day off and not miss any time.  How you ask?

1. For my online kids I use Blackboard Collaborate so I created a class and gave my brick and mortar kids the link back in late October and we all agreed that at 10 am on a snow day we would have class.  24 of my 30 kids made the class and the others watched the session which was recorded.  
2. If you don't have something like Blackboard Collaborate you could you a Google Plus Hangout live stream where you could send a link to your students and they could watch a live lecture (here's how).    You could then use Today's Meet to send a link to students and you could see their live questions.   You would be able to do this by splitting your screen. 
3. Today based on what we are doing I decided not to how an online session and instead made the video above as both an introduction and a continuation of our material.  Then my kids will watch this video and look up these court cases.  
4. I communicated with the kids by using Remind101, Blackboard and even using my gradebook which has all of the kids' emails.  For the Remind101 message I used a shortened tinyurl (tinyurl.com/fcpscoldday) which linked to my normal homework e-sheet. so I didn't have to text the kids multiple times with the assignments.  
5. We will start our class on Thursday with questions (several have already emailed me with some) and then take a quiz where the kids can use their notes.  Then we will move on and still be able to have our test next week without a hitch. 
6. So if you have a motivated bunch and you can afford to miss a day of school you might want to try some of the techniques. 

Take My Course

I will be teaching the sixth version of my technology integration course with Fairfax County Public Schools this spring.  We will learn about such items as webquests, pacing your students individually using technology, flipping the classroom, using electronic textbooks, collaborating online, how to use Google Drive and lots more in a ten week course.  You can get more details here on page 42.  To sign up go to MyPLT (if you need help go to page 72) and put either the title or just a few words from the title or even e-mail me and I can add you to the class.  The deadline for signing up is January 17th.

The class will be on Thursdays from 4:30 to 7ish at Woodson.  It is free to FCPS employees, but if you live in the areas and are not in FCPS you can take it, but you have to pay for it (page 9).  The class fills up quickly, so if you are interested I would sign up sooner rather than later.  If you have questions, please e-mail me at ken.halla@fcps.edu. 

Historians Debate Origins of WWI on Twitter

Who started World War I?  Three respected historians, Simon Schama, Tom Holland, and Gary Sheffield tweet their views.

It all started earlier this month when British Education Secretary, Michel Gove, argued that the war was started by Germany and that it was a just and noble war for England.  Gove also attacked liberals, specifically the movie, "Oh! What a Lovely War," and "The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder" as "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite."

Russell Tarr, a history teacher who developed the site, Active History, sent out a tweet which started a discussion about the origins of World War I with  the three  historians. 

Tarr developed an awesome worksheet for his students  using the tweets from the historians. The worksheet contains all the tweets along with links to a BBC 4 Radio appearance by the three historians as well links to Secretary Gove's original remarks.

Students read the tweets and the articles and then discuss and debate the different views.

British Education Secretary: WWI was Noble & Just Cause

   
Understanding diverse interpretations of history is what makes the subject interesting. Often there are no clear answers.  But Michael Gove, Secretary of Education in Britain and pictured above, believes that World war 1 is an exception.

Gove seems to think that there is only one way to look at World War I.  He believes that the Germans caused the war and that liberal historians distort that view and that movies like "Oh! What a Lovely War," and "The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder" are "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite."

Gove argues further that the war was " a noble cause" and a "just cause." He adds,  "the ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified."

Historian, Sir Richard Evans, responded to Gove by saying, "How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism that put Germany in the shade and sponsored pogroms in 1903-6.”

Who says that history is boring?

Using Big Data to Puzzle WIth History

I just read a very interesting book called Uncharterd which looks at "culturomics."  It talks about how two Harvard trained researchers worked with Google to create a search engine for all of the (so far) 5 million texts that Google has digitized (of the 130 million it promises to have completed by 2020).  If you don't have time for the book, here is a great TedX that summarizes it.

The ngram viewer lets you look up any word(s) between 1800 and 2000 in the books written in English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish and Russian.  This would be a fun item to have your students use at the end of the year when they know enough to compare items.  For example, you could look at historical terms such as Mexican, Latino and Hispanic.  We know historically that anyone south of the border used to be referred to as "Mexican," but as we have started recognizing differences we have started using other words.
Here is another example.  How has the US changed its perception of itself and when did this happen?  Well if you go to the nGram Viewer, you can enter in "The United States is" and the "The United States are."  What is fascinating is that there is a definite break after about 1868.  Considering that it takes a couple of years to write books, it is amazing how quickly after the US Civil War that people started seeing our country as one nation as opposed to before the war when literature was more of less evenly split.  One can play games like this over and over.  See what your students can come up with to study.