Start with a Question

Some concepts are just hard.  They're hard to teach and hard to learn.  Every year that I've taught the History 10 curriculum to sophomores, one of those concepts has been 19th century European political ideologies.  Conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism have never really been pulled together into a lesson that excited me or my students.  We would work through it and we'd both be OK, but never enthralled.  This year I wanted to change that. Part 1: What Do They Already Know? I asked students to define and give examples of each term: conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism.  They used their understandings from a modern American perspective.  We talked it out and they wrote their examples on the Smart Board. Part 2: How Was 19th Century Europe Different? It was REALLY different.  Before going there, though, I wanted them to know what an ideology is. The next step was to help them understand what these ideologies mean to 19th century ...

I posted about my limited experience with Vine last spring soon after the app was launched by Twitter.  A couple of days ago in class I was in a bind, and the opportunity to use Vine as an academic tool presented itself.  I grabbed it. An analysis of the potential of Vine and Instagram videos in the classroom was recently posted on the Edutopia website .  After reading it, I was determined to find a way to make it work for me.  My philosophy is: If I can meet my students where they already are, rather than forcing them to learn on my terms, they are more likely to see how history can be relevant in their own lives. Things Weren't Going As I'd Planned I had spent the better part of a Friday evening building interactive review games through my Smart Notebook software.  I've used these activities before.  They give students a chance to play with the Smart Board and they review content to prepare for assessments.  But, when I tried to fire them up t...

Vine , an app that Twitter dropped on us mere months ago, is a massive success . It's not clear that Vine is the answer to the social media video problem, but it does appear that the service has solved a number of obstacles inherent to video that have traditionally kept it from mainstream success... The genius with Vine is that you can upload only six seconds of footage.  Six seconds is nothing - more like an animated GIF. And Vine's editing process is stupidly simple. -Eliza Kern, GIGAOM  It is so easy to use and attractive to social media consumers that Vine posts to Twitter outpaced Instagram posts to Twitter last week . On June 7, four days after Android released a version of Vine, Topsy Analytics, a San Francisco company that gathers and analyzes tweets, reported that the six-second video application had garnered 2.86 million shares on Twitter.  This number of Twitter shares surpassed those of Instagram, which had roughly 2.17 million shares. -Alana Abrams...