High School Resources

This idea comes from History Tech, which may be blocked, so I’m reprinting the entire article here below.  It’s a good way to bring in quality questioning, collaboration, discussion, and prior knowledge.

Activating prior knowledge is a vital part of any social studies instructional unit. A strategy called List / Group / Label can help you hook kids into a specific topic while giving your kids a way to trigger prior knowledge.

Step One:

Select a topic, idea, concept or even a difficult vocabulary word. An example might be the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case as an introduction to a civil rights unit.

Share the word or phrase with your students and tell them that they have three minutes to write down at least 10 words or phrases that come to mind when you the word. In our example, these words might include Linda Brown, Kansas, racism, civil rights movement and segregation. Once each student has completed their list, place your kids into groups of three.

Step Two:

Student groups should construct one list for their group, combining new ideas and eliminating redundant items.

Step Three:

Each group should now create multiple categories from their list. These categories might include such things as people, places and ideas. Ask students to also create labels / titles for each of their categories. Groups now share out their different categories and labels by posting them on large sticky notes or whiteboards. Encourage students to do a “gallery walk” around the room to view the thinking of others.

Step Four:

You now lead a conversation with the entire class to find similarities and differences in the lists and categories of the various groups. Develop a common classroom list of words and categories. It’s not important at this point for the content to be entirely accurate. Have students create their own individual graphical titles for each of the categories agreed to by the class. (Connecting images with content will help many of your students to remember the categories.)

Step Five:

Use the list and categories to guide future discussions throughout the unit, correcting the list as you and your students progress through the material. By the end of the unit, students will have had a chance to create a very detailed mental dataset.

Assessment:

The List / Group / Label strategy encourages student participation and allows additional learning as students acquire differing perspectives thus teaching others in their groups. It serves as a great way to pre-assess student content and vocabulary knowledge, activate prior knowledge and encourages high level classifying skills.

There are a lot of good timelines social studies teachers can use, I’ve mentioned TimeToast before, but this new one has an even better interface that students will like.

Capzles allows students to make timelines that includes pictures, content, and video.

Here’s an example that uses pictures and sound:

http://www-tc.pbs.org/lewisandclark/trailmap/images/trailmap.jpg

The Louisiana Purchase brings up a lot of great issues to the classroom: expansionism, slavery, presidential power, foreign relations, just to name a few.  One important aspect of this is being able to demonstrate to students how the West wasn’t always Calfornia. 

Here are some discussion questions or themes you can develop:

• What was the immediate impact of the Louisiana Purchase?
• What impact did the Louisiana Purchase have on slavery? Immediate? 20 years later?
• What impact did the Louisiana Purchase have on First Americans?
• Did Jefferson compromise himself by buying the Louisiana Purchase?
• Was the Lewis and Clark expedition a succesful scientific endeavor?
• How did the Louisiana Purchase affect Presidential politics?

Maps

1. From earlyamerica.com, http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/maps/louisianapurchase/colormap.htm.  Here you can an old school map, but the site has other resources like primers on Thomas Jefferson.
2. With interactive points: http://lewisandclarktrail.com/

Google Earth

1. KMZ file 
2. In Google Earth, go to Layers>Gallery>Rumsey Historical Maps>Zoom in or out on Google Earth until circular compass icons show up>The Lewis and Clark layer is actually the icon hovering over Idaho>Click the icon and a map will open up, click the map and it will show up on Google Earth.

Lewis and Clark

1. From National Geographic: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lewisandclark/
2. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/west/ is a game students can play, but may be a bit too juvinile for high school students.
3. From PBS: http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/
4. From the Smithsonian: http://www.edgate.com/lewisandclark/
5. Has a focus on Sacagawea: http://idptv.state.id.us/lc/index.html
6. Timelines and Journals: http://www.lewisclark.net/

Jefferson

1. Background info: http://www.monticello.org/jefferson/lewisandclark/louisiana.html 
2. Explores Jefferson’s moral dilemma with the Purchase: http://americanhistory.about.com/od/thomasjefferson/a/tj_lapurchase.htm 

Lesson Ideas:

1. WebQuest: http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/education/projects/webquests/lewisclark/
2. Scavenger Hunt: http://www2.grand-forks.k12.nd.us/elem/ss/lc/lcscavenhunt.htm

Image from http://blogs.chron.com/txpotomac/McCain%20Obama%20logo%2008.jpg

Right now the election on November 4, 2008 is the obvious big news and the Internet has a ton of useful sites for you to use.

One is YouTube, which is blocked of course. However, there is a simple work around. At home, find YouTube videos you want to use. YouTube has a special election center, http://www.youtube.com/youchoose08, that has 100s if not 1000s of videos that are uploaded daily. Once you find a video you want, go to www.zamzar.com and paste in the URL of the video you want, your email address and sometime during the day, you will get an email from Zamzar telling you it’s ready to download. Once you download it, the video is yours to keep.

Google also has an election center: http://www.google.com/2008election/, which gives you current news, news by state, election maps, and profiles of the candidates.

A new source is NBC’s iCue and their Decision 08 site. They have videos, discussion boards, an issues page, that ranges from the economy, education, to other social issues. It even has information on past elections with news clips to te 1950s. This site, Living Room Candidate, has an archive of old campaign ads.

Of course, each candidate has a very interactive home page: Barack Obama and John McCain. Just make sure your students don’t click on the dozens of donate links while at school.

Politico.com has a great swingstate map which keeps current polling in too-close-to-call states and then there is an interactive map at 270towin.com which allows students to change the votes of states to see hypothetical voting in the election. It’s currently set at 207 for Obama and 174 for McCain once the certain states are added up. The rest of swing states and students can click on each state to see which candidates will win with certain states. See what happens if Virginia votes Obama or McCain.

There are also a lot of websites students can use to determine which candidates best match up with their political beliefs:

• http://glassbooth.org/
• http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/
• http://www.selectsmart.com/president/2008.html (this can be embedded in your blog)
• USA Today

There are a lot of others and if you find one you like, use it, but check it out at school first to make sure it’s not blocked. Also, make sure the quiz doesn’t have advertising on it that you don’t want.

You could also have your students go to MySpace (John McCain|Barack Obama) or Facebook (John McCain|Barack Obama) at home to check out the candidates websites. This is an interesting fact, about how Barack Obama was the first to use Facebook as an election tool: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/how-barack-obama-won-facebook.

Last, if you’re interested in running a mock election UVA’s own YouthLeadership Initiative has the best resources for running an election where students can vote online. But you better sign up quick if you want to do this.

There are many ways to teach the Declaration of Independence and there’s a lot of history behind one of the most famous documents in US History. One way you can engage your students is by showing them the famous John Trumbull painting of the presentation of the document above. It’s an interactive painting the details each and every person sitting in the painting.

You can also go old school with SchoolHouse Rock at “Fireworks,” brought to you for free at TeacherTube.

The lyrics are found here: http://www.schoolhouserock.tv/Fireworks.html

The best website for the document itself is: http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/

Discovery Education also has few videos on the document, the best may be “Declaration of Independence, The: A Foundation of Ideas for a New Age.” Though it is meant for middle school students, it comes with a teacher’s guide and other handouts you can use in class.

This is a great lesson about using the Declaration of Independence as a break up letter: http://speakingofhistory.blogspot.com/2007/09/podcast-120-teaching-declaration-of.html. It will probably be blocked at school, so check it out at home. The lesson also gives you a good example of how podcasts work.

A major study of European history includes the Protestant Reformation. Many students attend church, but many do not understand why their churches exist they way they do. Some of these lessons below may help students understand the religious, social, and political significance of this time period.

As a warm up, students can go to this NY Times article (http://tinyurl.com/5afclv) about the late Pope John Paul II giving out indulgences before the year 2000.

Discovery Education has many short videos on the topic, but this one includes many of them:

• Introduction to the Protestant Reformation which is meant for middle school students, but includes Indulgences, the Diet of Worms, a bio on Martin Luther, and the Protestant Reformation in England.

Students can create an interactive timeline using Timetoast.com to enter dates, info, and pictures of the Protestant Reformation.

Here is the Wikipedia article on Indulgences. Specifically, have students read the discussion tab of this article to see how readers of Wikipedia respond to the article.

At opposingviews.com, there is a well researched debate on prayer in schools that could be a wrap up activity for this topic.

Teaching about Egypt is always an exciting thing with mummies, pyramids, hieroglyphics and so on.  However, its tough to let the kids really explore the pyramids.  Here are some tools you can use that can help give your students a more hands-on experience:

Google Earth’s Red Pyramid of Sneferu
Google Earth\’s Great Pyramid Complex

There are also good videos found in Discovery Education:

• Inside the Pyramids has 15 segments and totals 55 minutes in length.  It also includes a Teacher’s Guide that has more links, vocabulary words, and teaching ideas.

National Geographic also has a great website you can use to explore the pyramids: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pyramids/pyramids.html.

NOVA has created this site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/khufuenter.html
The BBC has created this also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/complex_gallery.shtml

This WebQuest is designed to get students to understand, in-depth, the 4 major causes of World War One: Alliances, Imperialism, Militarism, and Nationalism. Students will use the Internet for in-depth research, record a broadcast, create a resolution, and debate their positions.

Students will learn how to work collaboratively, they will communicate, and they will create solutions to the major problems of World War One.

You can find this WebQuest at: http://zunal.com/webquest.php?user=5797

This lesson is a part of the Google Earth “Places in Time” file. First, make sure you visit the five sites in the Places in Time.kmz file and then you can click on each discussion question on the left to leave your remarks. Please feel free to comment to anyone else also.

If you could, please leave your comments with just your first name, last initial, and the school you attend. So, Charlie Brown from Washington High School would be Charlie B., GWHS.

The second part of this assignment is to create your own Places in Time as explain in the Google Educator site. This part is up to your teacher, but you can create 1 new place mark, or many more. Please make sure you include the photo in your GE place mark.

Files can either be uploaded directly to this site by members of this site, or your teacher can then send me the new files for me to include and redistribute. If you choose to add a file yourself, please include your name. I will also update the discussion board with the new locations and pictures.

The “cloud” of words are the most common words used in 3 famous documents. From reading the words below, can you tell what document these words come?

created at TagCrowd.com

To do this, just go to tagcrowd.com and you can paste in text, give a URL, or upload a document.

This is from the website:

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

• as topic summaries for speeches and written works
• for visual analysis of survey data
• as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
• for data mining a text corpus
• for helping writers and students reflect on their work
• as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
• as resumes in a single glance
• as visual poetry

The list goes on and continues to grow.