Twitter – Page 4 – 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

September 28, 2014November 2, 2015

Class 6: Learning and New Digital Literacy

Class will open with a discussion of Snapshot of a modern learner and it’s implication for the classroom. I will offer a brief lecture detailing aspects of the “new digital literacy.”

Find, decode and critically evaluate information.
Curate, store and responsibly share it.
Effectively filter information flow and stay focussed.

For more of my thoughts on the impact of digital on teaching and learning, see my post What Happens in Schools When Life Has become an Open-book Test?

Students will have an opportunity to view GapMinder – a website that exemplifies redefined learning in the digital era. Students will get to use two additional transformative web-based research tools – NGram Viewer and NY Times Chronicle – to develop and test hypotheses. As part of an inclass demo of the power of word frequency research, students will share their results via a Twitter hashtag: #WordFreq

Here’s a Storify archive of our research

Books Ngram Viewer and NY Times Chronicle have many interesting applications in the classroom. For example, they can both be used to introduce the research method – form a hypothesis, gather and analyze data, revise hypothesis (as needed), draw conclusions, assess research methods. Working in teams students can easily pose research questions, run the data, revise and assess their research strategy. Students can quickly make and test predictions. They can then present and defend their conclusions to other classroom groups. All skills called for by the new Common Core standards. Ideas for classroom use Books Ngram Viewer and NY Times Chronicle. For more advanced searches using NGram Viewer click here.

Students will be introduced to Evernote a useful tool for curating and storing information and then sharing it with collaborative teams.
Evernote tutorials – Getting started.
How to use Evernote on web. (Use drop down menu to select other operating systems)

Assignment:
Preparations will begin for student design of document-based questions. At this phase students will be introduced to high quality online archives for World History and US History. Students will create an Evernote Notebook to begin to collect source material for prospective DBQ projects. They will share their notebook with the instructor by eve of Sunday Oct 5. Note: At this point student topics are speculative. Final decisions on topics will not be due until 10/22.

Image Credit: Family watching television. Evert F. Baumgardner, ca. 1958 National Archives and Records Administration

September 21, 2014

Class 5: Historical Thinking Part II / Twitter #sschat

This class leads off with a live demo of the #sschat on Twitter (Mondays 4-5 PM Pacific). Chats are archived here.

Will use the event to begin a discussion of using Twitter to build a personal learning network (PLN). Students that have not already done so , will be asked to create Twitter accounts. More on Twitter hashtags here.

Next, we will turn our attention back to our exploration of teaching strategies for developing historical thinking skills. We will deconstruct The Battle of the Little Bighorn Lesson Plan from the Stanford History Education Group’s Reading Like A Historian and how it’s designed to teaching skills in Sourcing, Contextualizing and Corroborating. Keeping with our “western theme” we will take some time to develop lesson ideas for using “Across the Continent” an 1868 Currier & Ives print drawn by Frances Flora Palmer. [Above]

Finally we will turn do some peer editing of our shared Google presentation of collecting student-designed mini-lesson based on the Beyond the Bubble assessment model. Assignment | Product

Assignment for Class 6 – Shared Google presentation should be done by bed time 9/24. Blog post due by next class.

Take the peer feedback and do a final version of your mini-lesson.
Write a brief reflection on the process – it could include your take on historic thinking, the specific lesson model borrowed from SHEG, working with a shared Google presentation, peer review process, etc.
Take all the content of your lesson plus the reflection and post it to our blog as your second authored post.

Reading assignment: Snapshot of a modern learner in SmartBlog on Education

Image credit: “Across the Continent” 1868 Currier & Ives print drawn by Frances Flora Palmer Newberry Library