Class 6: Progress and Poverty in Industrial America

Fourteen year old spinner in a[?] Brazos Valley Cotton Mill at West. Violation of the law. Matty Lott runs six sides.

Featured image credit: Photographer Lewis Hine Nov 1913. Caption: Fourteen year old spinner in a[?] Brazos Valley Cotton Mill at West. Violation of the law. Matty Lott runs six sides. Source

Overview

We will continue our examination of historical thinking skills based on the work by Stanford History Education Group. (SHEG). This curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. This session will use a selection of documents from the late 19th century to explore corroborating in the context of the rise of industrial America.


Class Session | Zoom Video

Students will work in teams to explore the documents in  Progress and Poverty in Industrial America (available free at iTunes). Also available online as a Microsoft Sway.

We will be using the 11 sources to create a graphic organizer that responds to the essential question: “How do we evaluate the social costs and benefits of technological innovations?” In additional will will add a twelfth perspective (anarchists) using Albert Parsons SAC.

Students will be supplied with the “Hexagonal Thinking Corroboration Tool” in Keynote. Corroboration prompts are from SHEG. This thinking tool inspired by this post. Keynote design adapted from here.

Hexagonal Thinking Corroboration Tool – Keynote will be shared with students.

After our review of the 19th century documents, we will consider the same essential question in the context of contemporary America.


Assignment 6 | Lesson Pitch 20-A6

This assignment will begin our preparation for lesson to be delivered in a future class after break.

To get some peer feedback before you get into detailed planning, this coming week you should prepare both a post and a brief pitch presentation that outlines your initial ideas for the activity. Hopefully we will give you good feedback that will make your lesson better.

Your post is the more SPECIFIC part of your pitch. If you were selling me a car – this would be the techs specs. It should include:
  1. good title and featured image
  2. target audience and setting – what class and how might this be used?
  3. content – what will be studied? Why is it interesting or important?
  4. process – what will you do – what will students do?
  5. resources for lessons – what do you plan to provide the students?
  6. Delivery considerations – how do you plan to deliver this remotely?
Your presentation is the FUN part of pitch. If you were selling me a car, this would be the test drive where you are pitching me on how cool it would be to own it.
  1. it does not need to include every part of the written post.
  2. it should be more visual than text based.
  3. it’s the big idea of your lesson – why do you want to teach this lesson, why is it interesting to you?
  4. what’s the essence of what students will be doing.
  5. it should be delivered “Pecha Kucha” style and consist of maximum of 20 slides. Each one timed to automatically advance at 20 seconds. You should aiming to “talk less, show more.” You will need to rehearse your delivery to match the slide timing. So your presentation will last no longer than 400 seconds. (6 minutes / 40 seconds)

Resources

If you want to plan long range – our presentation calendar looks like this

Oct 5: Pitch your idea – presentation and post
Oct 19: Your formal post sharing your finished teaching activity (some activities will be delivered)
Oct 26 and Nov 11: Remaining activities delivered

How to set up a Apple Keynote presentation so it auto advances every 20 seconds

Class 3: Historical Thinking Skills

Historical thinking skills lesson

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 get inspired by some SHEG lessons from their collections Reading Like a Historian and Beyond the Bubble.

Here’s what a Google From looks like: Photograph – Zulu Chief
Here are some student designed SHEG-inspired lessons that are delivered using Google Forms
  1. Reconstruction Cartoon – Thomas Nast
  2. Photograph – “War is Hell”
  3. Film clip – Charlie Chaplin film clip
  4. Political Cartoon – Votes for Women

In class Practice
Click image to go to curated collection of historical sources to practice using Google Forms | Source
Assignment 3 | Completed Posts 19A-3

Design a mini lesson based on one of the historical thinking skills in a Google Form and embed into your next post.

Google form lesson should include:

  1. Title
  2. Document to be considered – image or video (or short text passage)
  3. Archival source of document (be sure it’s in public domain)
  4. One or more questions for user to answer.
  5. Instructional goal

Then get embed the Google form in post (more instructions below). Be sure your blog post has:

  1. Title for your mini-lesson. Why not make it catchy?
  2. Featured image (could be created with your archival photo)
  3. Embedded Google form
  4. Brief reflection on the mini lesson, historical skill or use of Google form in classroom

Tech resources for lesson

More tips on using Google forms here

How to get an embed code for your Google form

How to HTML Snippets to embed your Google form into WordPress post. Note in this example I begin by getting the embed code from a Padlet. Once you have the any embed code on your “clipboard” you can use HTML Snippets in WordPress

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.)