It has been and exciting and enlightening time for our Citrus County Social Studies teachers with George and Carolyn Breaz, our trainers for the Primary Resource training we are engaged in. At the end of the two day session you will need to meet the follow-up requirement for our trainings.
This is fairly simple: you are going to make a blog entry.
Each participant will be required to submit one blog entry. The criteria for this post is:
1. Target date for delivery to either your staff or students
2. Links to resources you are going to use
3. Comment on outcome of your presentation with reflection that could mention:
- problems that occurred;
- what you did well;
- didn’t do well;
- and/or what you might change.
You need to both present your lesson and make your blog entry prior to Christmas break.
In order to successfully post, you might need to register with the blog. It's simple, easy, and safe to do. You will have to register on googleblog. Last name, first initial is usually a good way to go.
7 comments:
It has been great working with all of you again this year. We will be looking forward to reading your entries regarding the use of primary sources in your classroom, your department, and your school.
Just a couple of comments regarding a blog:
If you want to write your opinion on a topic, make sure you’re not going to be offensive as you write it.
Always make sure you check over your post for spelling errors, grammar errors, and your use of words. Paste your post in a word processor and run spell-check, or download a spellchecker for your browser.
Never disrespect someone else in your blog, whether it’s a person, an organization, or just a general idea. You don’t want someone making a stab at what you are passionate about; don’t do it to someone else.
Don’t write about other people without permission; if you can’t get their permission, use first names only. Never share someone else’s last name.
Watch your language! This is part of our school community. Language that is inappropriate in school is also inappropriate in your blog.
Make sure things you write about are factual. Don’t be posting about things that aren’t true. Link to your sources.
Keep it education-oriented.
Outstanding training. The two days are very worthwhile. I encourage all history teachers to take this inservice. You will not be dissappointed. Carolyn and George are wonderful.
I completed the lesson on 12/17 as a class we just finished going over the various acts imposed on the colonies by England.
I choose to use a Power Point of the cartoon located at the Library of Congress titled "The Bostons paying the excise-man or tarring & feathering / copied on stone by D. C. Johnston from a print published in London 1774". The reproduction number is LC-USZ62-1308.
Using the technique we learned concerning how to hide parts of the cartoon, I presented it to the class, who were in groups, with questions on the side.
I found it required two days to complete as that the first day was better then the second as the students could not keep up the suspense of waiting to view the complete picture. Therefore, I might have to try less "cuts" to keep their interest.
Otherwise, the main idea of trying to give students a technique to analyze specific items within the picture and the possible relation to a specific act and/or event went well.
I might want to change around some of the questions, or after viewing some parts allow the students to create their own questions to see if they get the whole concept of picking out various symbols and linking them to the person's viewpoint.
I presented my lesson to my students over a 3 day period this past Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (12/16-12/18). The original lesson plan called for the students to write a DBQ essay on the topic of World War II, but I was forced to switch the topic to the Gilded Age as that is what we have been studying. The general premise of the lesson is that students were to create their own analytical essay question about the era and then locate primary documents that could be used in answering the question. As a follow up, the students wrote a sample essay response to their own questions. After providing direction about the directions and procedures to the students, I provided the students with an annotated list of websites that they could use to locate their primary sources. Generally these were the same sites we looked at in our training (Library of Congress, Gilder Lehrman Instutitute, National Archives, "History Matters" at GMU, and NationalHumanities.org).
Having already studied document analysis and how to write a DBQ Essay, most of my students had little difficulty writing an essay question and finding documents to support it. The challenge they generally faced was in identifying specifically how supported a position related to their question. Many wanted to simply choose documents that were only superficially associated with the topic of their question. I feel like I set up the lesson expectations and precedures will with my students. They seemed to work with a clear purpose and make good use of their classtime. I do feel like in the future, I would include another review excercise on using primary resources to support a position. In addition, getting access to the computer lab was difficult due to the policies in our particular school. As a result, the students had to complete part of the activity by hand instead of getting to finish the project on the computers. Overall, however, I was satisfied with the lesson as it forced the students to be creative, analytical, and think at a higher level.
Let me start off by saying that I found this workshop extremely valuable. I found two really great political cartoons in my efforts to introduce WWII. I created a powerpoint using these poltical cartoons for my students which includes a link to the questions that are to be answered. This was not the first time I have used poltical cartoons in my classroom. I always have a fear that the political cartoons will go over my students' heads. In this instance, one did and one did not. I thought my students had all the background knowledge to handle these cartoons. I quickly found out that it wass partly my fault for the one that went over their heads. I neglected to teach them something that was vital to interpreting the cartoon. Therefore, we ended up answering the questions for this cartoon as a class. That turned out to be a good thing because students really did well with the other cartoon after seeing the process for the one we did as a class. Overall, I think these two political cartoons were a success in introducing Germany's intentions and introducing WWII.
Hi everybody! Once again we were fortunate enough to have that wonderful training. In my thirty-two years of classroom experience I have never participated in a series of workshops so beneficial to my work. Thank you!
My task was some what different than most of the participants. I was to bring this information to my department, to share what we had learned. I did this on Dec. 17.
I took my department through the following agenda:
1. Why use primary sources
2. Judging relevence, reliability,
and validity of sources
3. Links to sources and teaching
aids
Some of the links we visited are listed below.
http://www.loc.gov/index.html
http://www.primarysourcelearning.org/handbook/
http://www.archives.gov/
http://archives.gov/education/
http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/education/index.html
http://archives.gov/presidential-libraries/
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/educat33.html
My co-workers found the information extremely useful.
I've been looking forward to completing my lesson with my 8th grade classes since our training session. I wanted it to fall exactly where it should have in the curriculum. The lesson is about the Declaration of Independence and as luck has it, we just finished studying the document this week. I picked today (Friday, December 19, 2008) as the day to complete my lesson.
I’ve learned a few things:
1.BIG NOTE TO SELF: Do not complete a lesson of this type on the day before a break.
2.Have the links already saved on all the computers under favorites or have the instruction document saved on the desk top of each of the computers. Typing the web addresses in took SIGNIFICANTLY more time than I expected.
3.Because of the above two, the lesson was not completed in one class period of 45 minutes. This lesson MIGHT work in 1 period if the students can just click on a link and are able to concentrate on the assignment.
Those problems aside, the lesson went pretty well. It is a lesson I will repeat next year (on a different day J).
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