The art and craft of teaching
Every semester students publish a collection of historical thinking skills lessons in a showcase. In prior years we used iBooks Author. This year we switched to Microsoft Sway.
Here’s our Fall 2018 showcase.
American Reactions to the Vietnam War
by Nick Krautscheid
Ending WWII
by Nicole Matier
War and Society
by Gabriel Bruneau
Equality on the Front
by Jana Peters
Westward to Equality
by Jordan Bonnell
Wounded Knee Massacre
by Nick Campagna
Today’s class will meet in the digital lab and complete our final projects using Sway. Students will then create one final blog post to showcase their Sway.
This final post should have a catchy title, featured image, brief intro to their lesson and use Sway’s “Visual Link” to to provide a connection to their Sway lesson from the post. See example of Peter’s Sway capture here.
Note: after you click “Get Visual Link” you will have the entire visual link (image and text) on your clipboard. Just create an insertion point on your new blog post and paste. You will see the image thumbnail and text. The visual link will simply capture the beginning text of your Sway. You can edit that once it’s been inserted into the new blog post.
1. Make sure you have properly cited all content in your Sway. Could be done right at the doc or as endnote list.
2. When you are finished, export your Sway as a PDF and upload to TaskStream for your final assessment.
3. Check the settings for the Sway and make sure you agree with them.
4. Use the “Accessibility Checker” to see what accommodations can be made. For example: identifying hyperlinks and providing visually impaired visitors alternative text for images.
4. Be sure your Sway includes “Lesson Designed by your name” and has a hyperlink back to the your author listing. The link is on the “Student Roster” Page. A “Control” or right click will get you the link to all your posts. (18A-1 through 18-A10)
Today’s class will meet in the Clark Library Digital Lab where we will begin design of our final project – a historical document-based lesson (DBL).
Your DBL will include:
We will be using Microsoft Sway as our design tool.
See Peter’s sample DBL made with Sway.
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Each student will log into their UP Microsoft 365 account and design their own Sway. (They will also invite Peter as a collaborator.)
For assistance using Sway check these resources
Quite often edtech tools are used by the teacher rather than the students and don’t do much more than make things prettier.
Think: Teacher at Smartboard as replacement for the overhead.
New digital technologies allows us to “see” information in new ways.
Think: Students analyzing a text using Wordle
History and other humanities that tended to be strictly narrative are leveraging data collection and display tools to spawn a new digital / data approach to teaching history and social science.
See Digital Humanities Projects at Stanford
Many apps and websites can be a great tool to introduce the research method – form a hypothesis, gather and analyze data, revise hypothesis (as needed), draw conclusions, assess research methods. Working in teams students can easily pose research questions, run the data, revise and assess their research strategy. Students can quickly make and test predictions. They can then present and defend their conclusions to other classroom groups. All skills called for by the new Common Core standards.
In today’s class we will explore a sampling of free online data visualization tools that can be used in the classroom. Students will be asked to incorporate one of these tools into a lesson design.
Choose one or more of these digital tools (or use a favorite of yours) and blog about how you would use it in an activity, lesson or unit. Be sure you focus on an idea that allows your students to be using the tool. Be sure to link to the tool and include a screen shot. If the digital tool allows results to be embedded in the blog. Here’s how to use HTML Snippets.
Image credits:Teaching with a SMART Board / Flickr
