Tag: nGram Viewer

Prompt: Write a blog post in response to our class on digital history.

I enter the teaching profession at an interesting and tremendously exciting moment in history. Barriers are evaporating left and right and educators have access to more powerful, inexpensive resources than ever before. Last week’s class gave me an opportunity to explore some of these new tools and I really liked what I saw.

I had a great time participating in my first #engsschat on Twitter and enjoyed e-meeting my future colleagues from around the country. Twitter seems like a terrific venue for collaboration and I am excited to use it to continue a dialogue with other social studies educators. A planet’s worth of classroom innovations are just a hashtag away.

I was particularly impressed by some of the big-data tools freely available online. The New York Times’s “Chronicle” language usage visualization tool is an elegant and simple way to perform powerful analyses of discourse. Google’s Ngram Viewer is a similar resource that reveals patterns of word or phrase usage in books. However, there is no doubt that the coolest addition to my teaching toolkit was GapMinder. Gapminder empowers visitors to easily test sophisticated hypotheses using a treasure trove of datasets. The inclusion of a “time slider” is especially useful and could shed light causal relationships that aren’t otherwise obvious to students. I’m certain that this website has enormous potential to help students recognize and analyze complex social phenomena and I plan to incorporate it into future lessons.

Prompt: Write a blog post in response to our class on digital history.

In our last class we went over the many different uses of technology in a classroom that were ways for students to deepen their inquiry into a subject without having to accumulate the information they needed to sift through our selves. to show this exploration we used Twitter.

My problem with Twitter isn’t that it it constrains users to 140 characters in a single thought, or that you have to use those infernal hashtags in order to determine what groups receive the message you created. My problem with using Twitter in the classroom is rather that it constrains those who use it to shotgun information to each other. In the Eng/SS chat that we participated in the volume of information that was communicated to each of us was overwhelming. I would rather have the chance to read a detailed response that had the teachers involved explain their reasons in order to further examine the material presented to other teachers. I think moving the SS chat to another venue that supports the development of collaborative ideas rather than having teachers shotgun their response to a question would better model what we expect from students in this changing world.

I found the tools of Ngram viewer and NYTimes Chronicler to be great ways for students to explore the modern era of literature and popular culture. If the focus of a unit is to explore the history of a phrase or ideas then I can see a great way to enter into a unit or lesson where students are going to link the rise and fall of certain words or phrases with historical events. An example would be linking the usage of the Great war to World War I, where the term Great War was used before the second World War once the second begins the term World War I appears in the lexicon of the New York Times, without the background knowledge that people never thought that there would ever be a war as awful or all encompassing as the first World War then the lack of World War I as a term before the second would make little to no sense. The tool provides a way for students to aggregate a large amount of information without having them to know what they are looking for allowing them to make the connection between the terms searched without outright telling them.

The many different applications and uses of technology provide a myriad of ways for students to interact with each other and their teachers. At the same time technology is changing the ways that teachers are able to interact with each other. These are some exciting times for the usage of technology in the classroom, but the challenge of how to use these applications will remain.

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Image Credit: English: HMS Dreadnought (British Battleship, 1906) underway. Taken July 1906. From the U.S. Naval Historical Center. Licensed in the Public Domain Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HMS_Dreadnought_1906_H61017.jpg

Prompt: Write a blog post in response to our class on digital history.

Last time in our Social Studies Methods class, we found ourselves trying many new things. From participating in a twitter chat, to exploring websites like GapMinder,  NYT Chronicle, and Google Ngram Viewer. These tools, while interesting to use in making comparisons also present new ways of examining information.

When I first took a look at each of these sites, I had fun seeing that you can take different pieces of information and see how they might relate with each other. I saw how you could take a site like NYT Chronicle and search words like “Happy Holidays” and “Merry Christmas” and examine their usage throughout the history of the New York Times. It showed how word usage and word choice are important things in our culture and history. With something like a Twitter chat, I saw the chance for easy collaboration and reflection on how I am doing as a teacher. Twitter chats present the chance for interaction on a scale that goes beyond the classroom.

I would like to use these tools in my own future classroom. I find that these tools offer the chance for students to look at information and make inferences about what that information tells us about history. If you take the example mentioned in the previous paragraph, then it could become an example where I ask students why we added the use of “Happy Holidays” in our writing. I might also ask students why usage of “Merry Christmas” has seemingly gone up over time. In learning about these different sites, I have found that there are plenty of new resources emerging to get students engaged and asking questions related to history and social studies.