Class 4: Crafting a Lesson

Crafting a Lesson

This class will begin with a review of the learning activities designed by students in our last assignment. Next we will discuss critical components of a good learning activity.

Assignment 3

Students will develop and deliver a 30 min lesson in their assigned class

  • 9/24 – Nicole, Nick K, Gabe
  • 10/1 – Jana, Nick C, Jordan

Students should also do a blog post that previews the lesson – noting:

  • target audience
  • content (what will be studied)
  • process (what will you do – what will students do)
  • resources for lessons
About the lesson
The lesson should a historical thinking skills lesson. Specific content of lesson is up to you. If you can get the timing right, we can offer you feedback before you use it with your students.
  1. This lesson should be delivered as if we were your class.
  2. Your peers will serve as participant observers noting lesson content, nature of the student task, lesson delivery and student workflow.
  3. Feel free to design a flipped lesson in advance and let the class know of your plans and required viewing.
  4. If you have a significant amount of reading required, send it to us in advance.
  5. After your delivery of the lesson go back and edit your post with synopsis of what you learned from our class feedback.

Class 2: Historical Thinking Skills

Historical thinking skills

Our class begins with a review of the Sam Wineburg reading and TEDEd flipped lesson Who is the historian in your classroom? (That will also provide a chance to discuss the efficacy of flipping content.  What are the challenges and opportunities for that approach?)

Today we begin our study of historical thinking skills based on the work of Sam Wineburg and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). We will focus on three key historical thinking skills – Sourcing, Contextualization, Corroboration. See Historical Thinking Chart  (pdf in English and Spanish at SHEG).

We will explore search techniques with a focus on finding public domain or Creative Commons licensed content. For more information on public domain searches visit our edtech methods toolkit / Digital Hygiene

ASSIGNMENT 2 | Completed work

(Will cover 2 weeks)

a. Watch three videos at  Teaching Channel – Sourcing, Contextualization and Corroboration. See how to teach these skills in the classroom. You’ll be “teaching” a demo lesson 9/24 or 10/1.

b. Get inspired by some SHEG lessons from their collection Beyond the Bubble.

c. Design a mini lesson based on one of the historical thinking skills. Gather historical source(s) that could be used by a teacher to teach one or more  historical thinking skills. Sample posts from earlier class.

  1. Featured image and title for your mini-lesson. Make it catchy!
  2. Indication of one (or more) of the historic skills to be studied – Sourcing, Contextualization, Corroboration.
  3. One or more historic documents to support the lesson. Brief historical text can be inline text in the post or longer passages could be uploaded as pdfs. Any image content should be in the public domain. 
  4. Cite the source(s) with title, creator (if available), date of creation, and URL hyperlink back to source material.
  5. Guiding questions for students to use with document(s)
  6. Brief reflection of how the document(s) and question(s) should reinforce the targeted historic skill(s)

Log into each others’ posts and leave some comments about how the historical gallery could be turned into a learning activity. In our next class we will continue that discussion.


Here’s how to do a public domain image search, insert image into the post and add a hyperlink

If you have a collection of images for your post – you can put them all into a WordPress Image gallery using this tool. (Or just insert as image into the post.)

Class 1: History Teacher’s Meme Smackdown

Here’s the flow of our first class  – a chance to get to know more about the course and try our hand at our first two tech tools.

  1. This our first class  … so …  why not solve a Murder Mystery! (It’s how I opened my high school classes for years). Find mysteries here.
  2. Peter will offer a  quick demo of AdobeSpark Post –  a great tool for creating striking title slides with public domain content.  See video below for more. Remember to size your graphic to 640 x480 pixels.
  3. Students will get a quick overview of WordPress and be pointed to our YouTube playlist.
  4. Next, we’ll discuss their vision of the “history teacher.” They will be invited to turn those ideas into memes using AdobeSpark Post
  5. While students are working, Peter will get each student logged into our WordPress account.
  6. We’ll have a meme smackdown and reflect on the activity and how the classroom workflow was designed and managed.

Assignment 1 / Completed work

Task 1: For your first blog post write an elaboration / explanation of your meme. The post is due by midnight Friday Aug 31st.

Students should be sure their post includes a featured image (meme) made using  AdobeSpark. Use your meme from class or make a new one.

Here’s some post prompts – feel free to use one or more for inspiration.

How the meme reflects …

  • What you see as your “models” for history teacher.
  • The challenges or opportunities of teaching history.
  • How were you taught history? Is that how you intend to teach?

Task 2: Introduction to Historical Thinking

All student will:


Image credit: Adobe Spark