Halstead, Blog Post 13

Overview: The image above is Meriwether Lewis of the famous explorers, Lewis and Clark. His legacy as an explorer, his position in frontier history, and his relationship with Clark make for exciting history on their own, but one of the lesser known things about Lewis is the debate about whether he committed suicide, or he was murdered. This connects with chapter 8 of our text because it provides students an opportunity to ask all 3 of the major historical questions (what, why, and how) in an interesting and engaging way. I elaborate on this in the screencast below.

Screencast: Screencast 13

Big Question: How can we engage students in meaningful inquiry if they do not enjoy history?

Interactive Site: The interactive site for this blog is a "just for fun" history site dedicated to made-up journals of Lewis and Clark. In these fabricated journals, Lewis claims on several occasions to have seen bears wearing human pants. While amusing, these journal entries could also be used as an opener to historical inquiry and analyzing primary sources.

Halstead, Blog Post 12

Overview: The image above is the full image that Loewen references in chapter 6 of Lies when discussing how John Brown and his raid at Harper's Ferry are often interpreted as the fanatical and doomed plot of a madman. In making his case, Loewen might have been better off to use the full image as opposed to the one cropped in on Brown's face. Here, one can see the scope of just how insane this representation of Brown is meant to make him look. He is a giant, stepping on the heads of the dead and towering over all others in the background. The image reflects nothing of Brown's calm and reflective nature prior to his execution for treason. Loewen's main argument in chapter 6 of Lies is that the erasure of big ideas from American texts (particularly racism, Loewen's pet preoccupation) does a disservice to students and to history by steering clear of any real controversy in an effort to remain as palatable as possible to everyone. 

Screencast: Screencast 12

Big Question: How can we present big ideas to students when textbooks actively undermine this process?

Interactive Website: The interactive site for this blog is an interactive map of slavery over time in the United States that can demonstrate to students the expansion of the institution as well as its status immediately prior to the civil war. This is of particular importance to Loewen's case because the density of slave population likely correlated positively with seccesionist sentiment. The map can be found here, and would be a great way to show students how and where slavery spread over time using census data.

Halstead, Blog Post 11 (Cantu Chp. 7)

Overview: The image above was created by cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who pictured fantastical and overly complicated contraptions for comedic purposes in the 1930's. The concept of a "Goldberg Machine" quickly caught on in both language (taken to mean something needlessly complicated or indirect for performing a simple task) and practice (contests to build the most convoluted machines in the spirit of Goldberg's drawings exist today). As educators, we must take great pains to ensure that the technology we are introducing in the classroom is not acting as a Goldberg machine. In other words, classroom technologies should be unobtrusive, well implemented, and help improve overall learning outcomes. They should not make simple educational tasks unnecessarily complicated.

Screencast: Screencast 11

Big Question: How can teachers ensure that the technologies they are adopting are beneficial?

Interactive Site: This interactive site is a shameless self-plug to a Weebly I created for another class here at Bradley. Since the spirit of this chapter is top instructional tools for teachers, I thought it would be helpful to share some of my own. The page I linked is dedicated to tools in History/Social studies that I thought might be useful for the future. Many of the tools/sites on this page are interactive and deal with many types of media, including music.

Halstead, Blog Post 10 (Cantu Chp. 6)

Overview: The image above shows a room full of brand new Americans being sworn in. I have the opportunity to lead a civics discussion prior to a similar event that will be taking place in the Renaissance Collesium next week. High school students who have lived in America their entire lives likely know less than all of the people in the room above when it comes to U. S government. It is our charge as teachers to prepare students to be good digital citizens so that they can be good citizens in general, as technology use and digital information transfer in the United States become ubiquitous.

Screencast: Screencast 10

Big Question: How can teachers best prepare students for digital, as well as actual, participation in U.S society?

Interactive Site: This page on the cyberwise website features a host of different interactive games teachers can use to introduce students to digital citizenship. One of the games is featured on Brain Pop, which was popular in my school when I was younger.

Halstead, Blog Post 9 (Cantu Chp. 5)

Overview: At the risk of sounding dramatic, I firmly believe that the scene above represents the demographic crisis of technology in the classroom. In this scene, the H.M.S Titanic is steaming toward an iceberg that will cause the ship previously considered "unsinkable" to shatter in two. Had the captain taken more caution in dangerous waters, the people who died that night might still be alive. So here is the comparison: The Titanic is the U. S education system. The water is all the available technologies of modern society (particularly the internet and apps) and the surrounding icebergs are a full embrace of technological assimilation in the classroom. We are each the captain of our own Titanic. Technology in the classroom is just as much a fact of life as the ocean and ice in polar regions, and we must determine our approach with serious caution if we want to safely navigate ourselves and our students to the other side. I elaborate in my screencast.

Screencast: Screencast 9

Big Question: What degree of technological skepticism is healthy for an educator?  

Interactive Site: The site I chose is called Edmodo. Edmodo is a full-scale learning platform designed for high school classrooms and similar in function to administrative systems like Sakai or Blackboard. It is designed to provide students with an online workspace where they might feel more comfortable sharing (e.g blog posts) than they might in a classroom. Teachers can post assignments, reminders, and interact with students.

Halstead, Blog Post 8

Overview: The top image is a painting that dates from the civil war era. It shows Crispus Attucks dying as one of the first casualties in the American Revolutionary War. Abolitionists of the period were attempting to paint Attucks as an American patriot. He was a runaway slave who lost his life in the first scuffle for American liberty and may stand in as a representation of the Black soldiers who died during the ensuing conflict. 

  

The bottom image is of a Black man being lynched over a hundred years after the Revolutionary war had drawn to a close. For all the high ideals of the Revolution, Black people in America continue to face racism and discrimination to this day. It is imperative that we address contrasts between American idealism and American realities with students, lest they believe we have achieved the ideal.

Screencast: Screencast 8

Big Question: How should we, as educators, handle issues of race and racism in the classroom?

Interactive Site: The site I chose is an incredible resource for teaching about racism in the classroom. It can be found here on the ASCD In-service website. ASCD is a multinational nonprofit dedicated to advancing education. While the page itself is not interactive, it provides links to several forms of media including videos and podcasts, as well as a number of articles.

Halstead, Blog Post 7

Overview: Chapter 4 of Dr. Cantu's book provides several pages of instructional strategies for engaging students in the classroom. Much of the chapter is in a list format, providing brief explanations of each of the learning techniques or strategies being presented. Graphic organizers are also given a great deal of space, with a large compendium of examples or formats provided. There are several great resources in this chapter, which I discuss in greater detail in the screencast.

Screencast: Screencast 7

Big Question: How can we provide students with a schema for learning history/social studies?

Interactive Site: I chose the interactive quiz site Kahoot for my interactive site. This easy to use, quiz-style learning site is fun for students and an easy way to help them review basic information in a way that is interactive. There is also an element of competition in Kahoot. Depending on your students, this may be a benefit or a hindrance, so knowing your students is (as always) key to implementation.

Halstead, Blog Post 6

Overview: In the third chapter of Lies, Loewen describes the decimation of Native Americans at the hands of European diseases while dismantling the mythos that surrounds the first Thanksgiving. The image above is in Lies as well, accompanying a graphic description of how pandemics of smallpox would tear the skin off of their Native victims. The takeaway from this chapter is that there was much European settlement and contact prior to the landing at Plymouth Rock that cleared the way for a very easy settlement there, which also would not have been possible without immediate and constant native support.

Screencast: Screencast 6

Big Question: How do we approach subjects like native decimation with young students?

Interactive Site: The site linked here is not necessarily interactive, but provides some interesting perspectives on native decimation in the Americas via disease, including a source that seems to contradict Lowen's assertions that Native Americans were, by and large, healthy and clean people upon European arrival in the "new" world. It also addresses the question of why no "new" world plagues (what the author dubs "Ameripox") invaded the Old World.

Halstead, Blog Post 5

Overview: Chapter 3 in our book by Dr. Cantu discusses the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains of learning and their relationship to lesson planning. The picture above shows the advantages of the jigsaw method, which is an instructional strategy that can be used to incorporate differentiation of instruction into the classroom. In my screencast, I discuss the use of flexible grouping in my novice teaching placement as a means of fostering student engagement and appealing to the three major cognitive domains.

Screencast: Screencast 5

Big Question: What methods can we use as teachers to meet all of our students' learning domains?

Interactive Website: Part of this chapter focusses on using mind maps as a visual method to maintain a central focus when working from an objective in lesson planning (a strategy that can also be applied to differentiating lessons for students). The web app at this link is called Bubbl, and it is a free mind-map generating site with templates to get you or students started.

Halstead, Blog Post 4

 

Overview: In chapter two of Lies, Loewen writes about the dual meaning of "exploit" regarding Christoper Columbus: His exploits of "discovery", and his exploitation of the native people. This chapter tears apart the feel-good and heavily Eurocentric view of Columbus provided by textbooks and brings primary sources into the conversation to shed a greater light on the atrocities he committed. More than that, Loewen argues that the whitewashed version of the Columbian Exchange is boring to students and robs them of a perfect opportunity to put hundreds of years before and after 1492 into an appropriate context. The image above is a painting depicting Spanish war dogs being used to maim and disembowel Arawak Natives.   

Screencast: Screencast 4

Big Question: Which American contributions to the Old World are overlooked in the analysis of the Columbian exchange?

Interactive Site: The site I chose for this blog is an interactive site on the Columbian exchange. I chose this site as an example of the limited scope in the conversation surrounding the exchange because it provides a useful starting point in exampling what is not there. Namely, the transfer of ideas and culture from the New World to the Old and the impact they had in the following centuries. It can be found here: Columbian Exchange Interactive Map

Halstead, Blog Post 3

Overview: The image above comes from the website for Minneapolis public schools. I have used this image because I believe it presents multiple facets of History SS standards in a clean and inviting graphic, and the topic of this blog's screencast is standards. More specifically, the state and national standards in History SS that we will be using as teachers to guide our lessons and our students, including National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Standards, Common Core State Standards, and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) Standards.

Screencast: Screencast 3

Big Question: What standards do we use in creating lessons for our students?

Interactive Website: The interactive site I have chosen for this blog post is a page from the Common Core State Standards Initiative site. This page provides an interactive map of the United States and its territories with links to each state/ territories' learning standards, color-coded by whether or not they have adopted the common core. It can be found by clicking here: Common Core State Standards Initiative Map