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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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Wikipedia and the Malleable Past
I will focus on one of the two questions (highlighted in bold) below: What are the challenges we face as history educators with presenting the past in the digital world? How have digital tools made it easier to teach about and help our audience(s) engage with the past? As a caveat, I’m not claiming to be a history educator in the traditional sense of the word but in my taking this class and as a history major, I have realized some challenges in the historical digital world. Challenge number one is making the historical documents available to the public so that then said public can use them to their benefit.…
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Film – Consuming and Creating
The film/images that I will use will be from the All-American newsreels available at the Library of Congress. I will lead my audience to think deeper about it by having them study not only the cultural aspects of the film but also the cinematography of it as well. I will ask various questions as well. For example, “what are your initial thoughts about this segment? What is the main argument from this newsreel? Can you provide any background information? How does this relate to some of the other similar primary sources that you have found on this topic? How does it differ?” and so on. I would use digital storytelling…
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The History of History Teaching
We had to choose to answer one of the three questions listed here: What elements of historical thinking have remained at the heart of history teaching over the decades? How have history teachers responded to technological change in the 20th and 21st centuries? How have external expectations constrained teaching and learning in history, and how might the digital turn disrupt those constraints? The one that I wish to answer is the third one (in bold above.) The external expectations that been placed on historical learning and teaching have hindered students in many ways. The SATs or SOLs or AP tests or any of the standardized tests have structured the historical…
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Thinking About Historical Thinking
The three questions that I hope to ask and then answer fully as the semester continues are: What you already know about this particular part in history? This question will be answered by my audience. What are you excited to learn more about? Anything that I can do to help you with that? This question will be answered by my audience. I still hope to gain some insight and various opinions as to what I can do to help. What are some of the ways that best help you learn new material?This question will help me understand how I could frame some of my content and/or questions to help my…