Learnist – Ed Methods

October 24, 2014

Class 9: Work Session

This week we take a break from introducing new content and take an opportunity to give careful consideration to our DBQ design project. Students will have the opportunity to comment on each others blog posts to give suggestions and feedback. I will take time to meet with each student individually to discuss their project. We will also put finishing touches on next week’s class where we will be guest hosts of #sschat on Twitter.

Assignment:
Students will open an account at Learnist in class on 10/27 and use the site to post their working draft DBQ.
Due date: Nov 3rd.

Learnist is a web-based curation site with built in social media tools – it can collect and comment on videos, blogs, books, docs, images or anything on the web. (Think Pinterest for education?)

Your Learnist board should be tightly focused on documents that help students answer the DBQ’s generative question. Each document should include one or two scaffolding questions which help the student to use the documents to answer the DBQ’s generative question.

For a sample of a Learnist board Incarceration of Japanese Americans During WWII
YouTube Tutorials – Using Learnist

Your peers will be able to make comments after each document on your Learnist board to help you focus the DBQ. Since Learnist is open to the public, you can expect that others outside our class may comment as well. Later we will use your Learnist as part of your guest post on Copy / Paste – example

Image credit:

A man and woman riveting team working on the cockpit shell of a C-47 aircraft at the plant of North American Aviation
Photographer Alfred Palmer
(1942)
Library of Congress LC-DIG-fsac-1a35284

October 5, 2014

Assignment: DBQ Design

Working as individuals or in 2 person teams, students will design a DBQ question suitable for inclusion of our DBQ iBook (available at iTunes).
See Class 7 for recommendations for DBQs and Teaching with Documents. Your DBQ will include:

Introduction of the DBQ with brief historic context as needed.
Generative / essential question
About 5 – 8 related documents (image, text, video, audio) that will assist the students in answering the generative question
A scaffolding question for each document to assist the student in examining the document

A good example of a DBQ is Progress and Poverty in Industrial America This is a pdf version of one of my iBooks. (note: you will not have full function of all the gallery and video widgets). It uses 11 documents, which is a bit more than I expect for your DBQ.

The DBQ Design Assignment will be accomplished in steps:

Step 1: Develop a proposal which will be submitted for peer review.
You should be prepared to deliver a 2 min pitch to class. (not a written assignment to be turned in)
Due date: 10/20.

We’ll do a bit of “speed dating” of our ideas for the DBQ Assignment. Students will form two lines and have 2 minutes to pitch their DBQ design idea to each other and share some feedback. Then one line will shift and we repeated the pitch exchange. In all students will pitch their idea three times.

The goal of this phase is to gather feedback from peers regarding the following:

You have an interesting generative / essential question worth answering.
Your initial appraisal indicates there are suitable documents available.
You have an idea for how students will interpret your documents. “What does it say, how does it say it, what’s it mean to me?”

Step 2: Students will share their revised idea as a blog post at EdMethods by Sunday Oct 26th. It should explain how you intend to address the 3 questions above. You may wish to include a sample document and related scaffolding question. Or you might want to focus on the “big picture” of what you are trying to accomplish with your DBQ. Feel free to note the challenges you face.

Step 3: Students will peer review a selection of classmates DBQ proposals in class on 10/27.

Step 4: Students will open an account at Learnist in class on 10/27 and use the site to post their working draft DBQ.
Due date: Nov 3rd.

Learnist is a web-based curation site with built in social media tools – it can collect and comment on videos, blogs, books, docs, images or anything on the web. (Think Pinterest for education?)

Phase 5: Students will finalize their DBQs for inclusion in our iBook showcase.

Title: “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

December 2, 2013December 7, 2015

DBQ: An Epic Journey

The DBQ assignment turned out to be much more difficult than I had originally intended. I initially wanted to combine the assignment with my fall work sample on the Roman Empire. I set out on a determined path to create a DBQ assignment based on Roman architecture, frescoes, and speeches. It became apparent quite early that this would be difficult. The point of the DBQ assignment is to use a primary source that will help students to answer broad questions about the historical time period in which it is set. These primary sources contain enough information that they alone can be used to answer the questions. This was the most difficult aspect of the project for me. Most of the images I had chosen were great sources about the rise and fall of Rome. However, they all required a lot of background knowledge to answer the questions about them. For instance, a fresco that depicted a Roman trireme manned by foot soldiers was supposed to show the students how the Roman army was used even for naval battles. However, while this was obvious to someone who already knew that fact, it was less clear to someone completely new to the topic. This meant that a student would not be able to answer the questions using just the fresco. I was actually able to use the Roman DBQ assignment for my work sample, in fact it tied really well into my lessons. It was not a true DBQ though, so I created a new one about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war.

The new DBQ does a much better job of using the documents and songs to generate questions that the students can answer using only the given sources. Despite this, I had trouble coming up with overall questions about the unit. I kept refining the topic until I had a good theme to work with. I was already using some music as evidence, and I added a couple songs to make the music of the time central to the DBQ. This also changed the main idea of the DBQ, which shifted from a focus on the civil rights movement to the general anti-war movement (although civil rights were still very important to the DBQ).

Overall, I learned a lot from this assignment, especially about using documents that are most conducive to the student’s knowledge level. Using a famous or popular document doesn’t really help the student to begin answering questions on their own. It is much more important to use a document that allows the student to be the historian and reach logical conclusions about the time period. I am excited to continue to use DBQ’s to teach students to examine, analyze, and interpret the documents in ways that will engage their critical thinking skills, and let the students do the work of a historian when trying to establish facts and conclusions about the time period.

This DBQ is part of our class-produced multi-touch iBook. Available free at iTunes

Sam Kelley

Image credit: The Committee to Help Unsell the War

November 30, 2013

Reflecting on the DBQ Assignment

The goal of my DBQ project was for students to gain an appreciation for how one’s perceptions of an event can be manipulated through media. The idea was for students to examine a variety of items, identify the techniques employed in conveying the message, and evaluate whether or not the techniques were effective. After investigating the media content within the lesson, students would apply what they learned by curating a series of media items that depict a certain perspective in a contemporary conflict.

Reading my original proposal for the project, I feel the final product achieves the goals I initially set forth. The lesson contains a variety of media types (print, posters, photos) and each example is accompanied by a set of questions that challenge students to do more than just identify what they see. I’m pleased with what I created because it approaches the study of history through a different lens. I can see this being more enjoyable than reading a history text or listening to lecture on a more traditional topic.

Though I am pleased with what I created, reservations do exist. This product has yet to be used. I don’t know how students or educators will react. Will they learn or appreciate the material I put forth? Will they find it engaging? It’s hard to say; especially since this was the first DBQ project I created. Teachers must always reflect and adapt. The project I created feels like a solid first step, but I want it to be used so I know how to make it better.

Once I decided upon a topic, the process was straightforward. However, I did run into one hurdle: curating the media. Selecting relevant pieces was challenging and time consuming. There is so much iconic media from the Vietnam era, but not all it was applicable to my objective. Using the wrong piece could lead to confusion and undermine what students are supposed to take away from the lesson.

A link to the final product on Learnist: Media & War

Image Credit: Louisiana State University Library

LSU student Luana Henderson participated in a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War held in 1970 on the LSU campus. The poster behind her refers to the killing of four students by National Guardsmen during a protest that turned violent at Kent State University in Ohio. University Archives, LSU Public Relations.

This DBQ is part of our class-produced, multi-touch iBook. Available free at iTunes