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Final Project Draft
My final project for HIST 689: Teaching and Learning Digital History is entitled Impacting Everyday News During World War II. This project is a course where college students will learn more about World War II but through the lens of reporting/news media coverage. They will be given a couple of links to the All-American News newsreels, an African-American news source during the 1940s and 1950s, available at the Library of Congress. They will analyze the newsreels and then compare and contrast it to other news media coverage during World War II. They will come up with an historical thesis based on their findings. I split the course into topic sections…
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Focus on Final Projects
After watching the videos of previous HIST 689 students discuss their projects and give some advice, I had a couple of takeaways that I can apply in my final project. They discussed collecting resources, making the course structure, having the activities coherent and applicable to the lesson, just to name a few. I liked how in some of the videos, they not only gave the content/resources but they also gave the learning objectives either at a course level or for each module. One action item that I would like to do based on one of the videos, is to have my students record themselves talking about their thought process for…
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Sixth Piece of the Puzzle
My final project will be and online course where my “students” will be able to learn more about African-American newsreels in relation to other forms of media during World War II. Their final project will be to create a script for an audio podcast or video news segment where they analyze their historical findings. My intended students will be those in undergraduate history and film studies majors. They should be able to look at African-American news segments, from the All-American News, during the War and compare it with other media during the same time period. It can be about any type of political, social, economic, culture, etc. issue but in…
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Fifth Piece of the Puzzle
One text that I will use in my final project is using some kind of online newspaper database. One example would be using Google Newspaper Archives as a resource. I will give my audience this option along with a list of other newspaper and other kinds of media databases, to search for content based on their thesis. Some of this content based on their search results might give them information about what was being said about that particular topic throughout the nation/world. They can use this resource to help them compare against the All-American news reel sources and analyze the relationship between the two. One activity that I might have…
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Fourth Piece of the Puzzle
I chose this video from the Library of Congress because it is one out of at least 20-30 All-American newsreels that my audience can choose from. It will be difficult to analyze this source because it is a short segment with a lot of information in it, so my audience will need to fact-check the items mentioned. They will need to choose at least one or two of the newsreels to analyze in their final projects so watching each one, seeing what is being said, how that compares to other news media coverage during this time, will be at least time-consuming.
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Third Piece of the Puzzle
My intended audience would be upper-level History, English, or Film Studies undergraduates at a university. I chose this audience because they should be knowledgeable about History/English/Film to be able to analyze the sources carefully. Also I want for everyone in that audience to give feedback because maybe they can offer insight into the activities that I cannot.They should be able to form well-formed arguments and conclusions and be able to use technology of some sort to do their final project.
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Second Piece of the Puzzle
Two questions that I need to answer are: How will digital media and/or digital tools be important to teaching my target audience one of the essential lessons I’ll be focusing on in my project? The digital tools and media will be important to my final project because I need to have the ability to show videos and play audio recordings on it. I also need a view where my audience can create their artifact in piecemeal fashion and still save their work as they go along. I want my audience to be able to respond or react to the videos or other content that I add in a way that…
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First Piece of the Puzzle
Some initial questions that I want to address in my final project (I may change these questions a bit later once I figure out my project or get more clarification on what/how it might look like.): Why did you choose the historical topic/question and why? What sources did you find to back up your argument?This question will help me understand why they chose the topic that they did and/or how they reached those historical conclusions about my topic. If the amount and availability of resources wasn’t an issue, what topic would you wish to explore more after going through my exhibit?To get an understanding of what they like so that…