Start with a Question

In cooperation with the Barat Education Foundation and its TPS-Barat Teaching with Primary Sources from the Library of Congress  program, I've writt en a 2-part series about historical image analysis. Part 1 was published tonight and focuses on how to use digital tools to help students analyze and annotate historical images as part of their learning. The article includes: how student learning and engagement increases when they annotate digital images individually on at their desks vivid examples of student work with real historical images from my classroom user guides for Skitch , a powerful (and FREE) image annotation tool that is available across all mobile platforms Click here to read the article and see sample student work. Stay tuned for Part 2 next week. It will explain the teaching method behind deep image analysis and how it can be a dynamic part of the study of primary source evidence in your classroom.

Educators know why they teach.  EdTech entrepreneurs know why they think their tool will solve a problem for teachers and students.  But why is technology integration in the classroom essential to learning for today's students? For over a century, inventors and thinkers have claimed that the latest piece of technology would revolutionize education .  How are mobile technology and web-based apps different than every invention that preceded them?  The answer is that they are not, really.  It isn't the technology that changes education.  Technology is a tool that can make a revolution in education possible.  But this is only possible if we change our approach to learning. These are the questions I ask myself as I plan learning experiences for my students.  It is important to note that the order of these questions is key. Question 1: Why do I want my students to learn X? Note that the first question is not, "What do I want my students to...

I typically don't write tool-based blog posts since I prefer to focus more on the philosophy and pedagogy behind teaching with technology.  On the other hand, sometimes there is a tool that is just awesome and worth writing about.  In my classroom, one of those tools we always come back to is Skitch. Skitch is an image annotation and creation tool.  If you are interested in giving it a try yourself after reading this post, here are some tutorials: Basic how-to from Rockets Help Desk Paperless rubrics with Skitch tutorial My students and I have found many uses for it.  Here's a list of some of them, with examples from my student Katie, who gave me permission to post her great work.  If you'd like to see more you can visit her blog at Using History to Make History . Creating and Labeling Charts & Graphs My students have access to all class notes and resources on our website.  As we work through an analyze the information during a lesson, t...

I was honored to work with two other great history teachers, Ken Halla and Kevin Zahner , from across the country to author this article on how we use technology in the classroom to intensify our students' learning experience.  We all work with the Smarter Schools Project and were published in an article from SmartBrief .  Click the screenshot below to check it out. Click this screenshot to read the full article.

Crafting study of the American system of slavery for my 15 year old sophomores is always daunting.  Slavery is an affront to human dignity.  Teenagers feel little connection to this level of depravity.  I wanted them to experience an emotional reaction to the antebellum slavery debate, rather than to just learn about it as an obligatory part of their studies. To that end, today we did a document study of three different primary source opinions on the morality of slavery thanks to excerpts compiled by  The DBQ Project . The Sources We looked at excerpts from: Frederick Douglass's "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro" George Fitzhugh's Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters Reactions to John Brown, from The Americans  by Gerald Danzer The Task I divided the class into small groups of 3-4 students and each group was assigned one of the 3 documents. But they were told they could not read the documents yet.  We have been working...

The commitment to go paperless this year has been both exciting and challenging. Surprisingly enough, one of the toughest things to move into the paperless realm has been the department rubric. At our school, and in our state, there is an emphasis on measuring consistency from teacher to teacher and class to class with district determined measures . This means we: choose a common assessment that measures content or skills that we feel are essential for our students; design the assessment and the evaluation collaboratively as a group of educators; read, compare and contrast student work together; and  calibrate our evaluation of student work. For us, this meant working with document based questions (DBQs).  So how do I take a rubric that was designed for classrooms that use paper and adjust it to a paperless classroom?  Well, here are the steps: Step 1: Screenshot On every laptop keyboard there is a 'PrntScrn' button. Locate it. It is your friend. I use mine a...

If you read my blog with any regularity or follow me on Twitter you know I've transitioned to a paperless classroom this year. I've been lucky enough to have students who are willing to be on this new adventure with me. My well-intentioned plans don't always work perfectly when deployed in a BYOD classroom of 25 students. We've decided that there are too many benefits to the paperless model to let a few technical difficulties get in our way. Teacher and students have worked hard, together, so that we can benefit from the opportunities that mobile technology provides in a paperless classroom environment.  If it weren't for my students and their enthusiasm I never could have come so far... and I truly believe there is much much more my students and I will get to learn as we continue on our adventure together. It only seemed right that when I had to opportunity to share my paperless successes at a professional conference, students should lead the way.  At the Blue...

I'm on the verge of a BIG shift in the way I empower my students to record day-to-day learning in my classroom. I've blogged about doodle notes before to show how my students: edit screenshots of class notes design images to represent primary source analysis   My students have edited primary source quotes. They've taken digital notes directly on primary source images and art. But I haven't really gone full tilt with student sketchnotes. Sketchnotes are a more creative and engaging way to take notes.  They're posted all the time on Twitter. Tweets about "#sketchnotes" With all of the versions of doodling I've allowed students to use in the classroom, there is a clear structure I've put in place first.  I haven't really given them the freedom to doodle in a their own way.  I was worried that without some kind of linear guide my students would not get down the essential content I'm responsible for teaching base...

The Friday before a week-long February Break... deadly for student engagement. Add to that a Thursday snow day that threw any momentum we had accumulated out the window, and I needed a miracle. Thank goodness for BYOD and mobile devices. Students were learning about the American Colonization Society to wrap up our unit on Antebellum Slavery.  The racial divide that defined both the social and economic structure of the United States in the early 19th century is hard for my teenage students to comprehend.  Primary source analysis is the best way for them to learn the different perspectives of the era. Class Set Up After all students read a short background explanation of what the American Colonization Society was, I divided my class of 24 students in half: 12 read excerpts from James Madison's "Plan for the Emancipation of Slaves" from June 15, 1819 and 12 read excerpts of a letter from Richard Allen, Freedom's Journal, November 2, 1827 (Vol. 1, No. 34) . Mad...

Last week my students helped me explain how we use smartphones, tablets, and laptops in our class daily to learn in new ways.  I had to opportunity to present to a group of teachers and administrators at the Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence conference in Disney World (where is was 75 degrees) while still at Reading Memorial High School in Massachusetts (where it was 12 degrees). Thanks to some fine work by many members of our technology staff, we were able to video conference with the professionals in Florida along with  Jennalee Anderson 's 7th grade classroom nearby in town using  Cisco's Jabber software . Nine of my sophomore history students helped me explain how we use devices in class every day.  I'm the one wearing green standing in the back.  Our library media specialist, Sharon Burke , is standing next to me in the middle. My students used iPads, iPad Minis, iPhones, Surface tablets, or any other device they bring to school and use on our BYOD...

App-smashing, according to Greg Kulowiec , is: I'm just starting to venture into app smashing as my high school students become more familiar with a variety of iPad apps.  I don't think app-smashing is something that I could have feasibly done much before this point in the year because I needed to familiarize my students with a foundational list of the apps that we will use all year long. Once they have that knowledge base and experience, they can create all kinds of products! The Topic This past week my sophomores created videos about the European Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 .  I wanted to do more than teach them the history; I wanted them to investigate a complex question. We talked about what makes a revolution a success or a failure.  As a class, we agreed on how to design a scale of success and failure for political revolution.  You'll see these scales later in their final products. Getting Started First, they accessed the event summar...