Tag: iBook

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Class 7: Teaching with Documents

I is for India

I is for India,
Our land to the East
Where everyone goes
To shoot tigers, and feast

Common Core offers an incentive for teachers to use historic documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But document-based (DBQ) instruction in this context requires four key elements to be successful:

  1. The right documents.
  2. Knowing how to look at them.
  3. Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
  4. Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.

Class 7 offers strategies for assisting students to more closely read a document (in all their multimedia formats) by answering three Common Core questions.

  1. What did it say?
  2. How did it say it?
  3. What’s it mean to me?

Here’s a 1.3 MB pdf handout of my slide deck

Your best example of a DBQ is Progress and Poverty in Industrial America a pdf version of iBook below. It uses 11 documents, which is a bit more than I expect for your DBQ.

Next our class examined three sample iBooks. The first is my DBQ iBook “Progress and Poverty in Industrial America.” Next we looked at “Exploring History: Ten Document-Based Questions” an iBook designed by my fall ’13 EdMethods class. Finally we looked at my latest iBook, “Portland’s Japantown Revealed.” ~ All iBooks free at iTunes.

Assignment:
Students will design their own DBQ. Assignment (note – various due dates)

Examples of DBQ style questions

Page from: “An A B C, for baby patriots”
Creator: Ames, Mary Frances
Publisher: Dean & Son
Place of Publication: London (160a Fleet Street E.C.)
Publication Date: [1899]
Archive: University of Florida UF00086056:00001

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We Published an iBook!

Exploring_HistoryJust published at iTunes: Exploring History: Ten Document-Based Questions. 98 pages filled with interactive widgets and videos.

Download free at iTunes and be sure to give us a star rating and / or a review.

Ten engaging questions and historic documents empower students to be the historian in the classroom. The units draw from a fascinating collection of text and multimedia content – documents, posters, photographs, audio, video, letter and other ephemera. “Stop-and-think” prompts based on CCSS skills guide students through analysis of the primary and secondary sources. Essential questions foster critical thinking. All documents include links back to the original source material so readers can remix the content into their own curated collections

It’s a great resource for use in the classroom, and it serves as a model for teacher or student curation of historic content into interactive digital DBQ’s. For more on the content design, click here. For more on how we used iBooks Author, click here.

American and World History chapters include:

  1. “Red Scare Propaganda” by Kristi Convissor and Christina Steiner
  2. “Anne Frank: A Timeless Story” by Erin Deatherage
  3. “Easter: Irish Uprising 1916” by Peter Gallagher
  4. “Images and Emotion: WWII Propaganda” by Aram A. Glick
  5. “Music and the Anti-War Movement of the 1960s” by Samuel T.S. Kelley,
  6. “Cross-Cultural Contact: Native American and European” by Tom Malone
  7. “Visions of Freedom: The American Revolution” by Collin Soderberg-Chase
  8. “The Fight for Civil Rights: Women’s Suffrage in Visual Media” by Heather Treanor and Cory Casanova
  9. “The Power of Propaganda” by Kyle Stephens
  10. “Media and War: An Analysis of Vietnam War Propaganda” by Damian Wierzbicki.
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Class 14: Proofing our iBook

McGuffey's Reader

Here’s our workflow for collaborating on an iBook showcase of student designed DBQs.

During the last class session students used their prewritten text, selected images and video, they used about 2 hours of lab time to complete their chapters. They shared their chapter files and following class, I compiled their chapters into a single iBook and we use some class time to critique and see how chapters fit together. See draft iBook file here. (12.6MB pdf) Note: it still needs a cover, introduction and much editing.

I’ve arranged to have the iBooks draft file loaded on to iPads for the students to use. In Class 14 we will proof the draft and collectively design a cover and intro. After some final edits, I’ll upload to iTunes. Net result a student publication in just a few hours of lab time (with all research and writing done in advance)

Image credit: McGuffey’s Reader illustration n.d.
Miami University Library: nn-1351

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Class 13: Working on iBooks

Carlisle School - Printing ShopThis week we will be working in the Mac lab using iBooks Author to edit / format our DBQs for iTunes publication of a class DBQ collection. More info on iBooks Author here.

Peter will provide instruction in using iBooks Author. Students will use  material from their DBQ Design project as the foundation for their contribution to one chapter of the class iBook. Peter will arrange for publication on iTunes with all student work credited. DBQ assignment here. At the end of the class, Peter will collect each student chapter and assemble into a full iBook for review in class next week.

Image credit:  Carlisle School – Printing Shop (LOC)
Bain News Service,, publisher. [between ca. 1910 and ca. 1915]
Repository: Library of Congress Call Number: LC-B2- 2484-10

Note: Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918. Founded in 1879 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt under authority of the US federal government, Carlisle was the first federally funded off-reservation Indian boarding school. It was founded on the principle that Native Americans were the equals of European-Americans, and that Native American children immersed in mainstream Euro-American culture would learn skills to advance in society. More