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Turn your students into historians with primary-source based activities that develop historical thinking skills. Activities are ready to use in your classroom. Or alter an existing activity to fit your unique needs. Exchange primary source documents and modify activity instructions. Log in to borrow from an even larger selection from fellow educators.

This site looks really elementary, but DON'T be fooled! This company has units for various History subject areas (world, american, gov't, etc) that are based around activities AND taking lessons learned in the activities and making higher order thinking connections. I"m probably not doing the best job annotating this - but i will say this, I have one of the units and my students go NUTS over the activities and with their debriefing worksheets and discussion questions, my students really "get" the concepts and retain the learning.

Historians see themselves as detectives searching for evidence among primary sources to a mystery that can never be completely solved. Wouldn't this image be more enticing to a bored high school student? It would, and that's one reason why thinking like a historian deserves a place in the American classroom, the sooner the better.

And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all you've done is learn it. You seem to think that we're teaching you Western Civilization because gee, it's a great civilization. It's not. Like all civilizations, it has it's strengths and it has its flaws. Just because it's part of the dominant culture today doesn't make it good. Maybe the dominant culture today would be much better if certain aspects of Western Civilization were different - or even non-existent. Most of your essays saddened me because they were so full of cheer-leading for the West. Civilizations, Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern, don't need cheerleaders. They need critics.

Congress thinks people should know what's going on. I know, I'm skeptical, too. But they asked the Library of Congress to create this site where students can find out how government works or doesn't. Track bills, check up on your Congressman, or visit the LEARN section midway down the homepage for links to sections on how laws are made, how the Supreme Court works and a host of primary source documents sorted by theme: The American Revolution and New Nation; National Expansion and Reform; and Civil War & Reconstruction.

What I love about presenting is how themes emerge within my presentations that I was never thinking about before the conference begins. But somewhere in the process of doing 6 presentations at the EARCOS Teacher's Conference a theme in my sessions emerged.What is your container?We talked in many of

I made this wiki for a school PD session I ran. It contains links to my class wikis and other things I use in class. Let me know what you think.

The final videos can all be found here.  I hesitate to embed any in the post because I know I would be prone to pick the "best" one.  Please click on the link and randomly select one to watch! There are two pages of videos-and hey-leave a comment or a thumbs up!  I have to say, that after watching the kids make these, the final products just don't reflect the amount of work that is needed.  What I mean is that you shouldn't watch them and say "My kids could do that in a couple of days."  It took 360 minutes of class time to produce those 1-2 minute videos!! One thing I wished we had done is to write transitions so that the different videos linked together better.  I inadvertently led them to make videos on topics that come across as standing alone in time instead of being influenced and apart of other events and movements. Other good resources: Art Titzel Eric Langhorst John Fladd Karen McMillan Greg Kulowiec Mr. Canton Mr. Fogel Mr. Canton Authors write for different purposes.* The writing process is consistent across disciplines.* Technology is a tool for collecting, organizing, creating, and presenting informatio Tags: 6 COMMENTS SO FAR ↓ aimee // Dec 27, 2010 at 8:56 pm These videos really are terrific! I was able to pop in briefly and watch them being created (on Ustream)- such an amazing process! They are so deceptively simple and enchanting, yet require a myriad of skills. Well done! And, I've learned so much Reply Tweets that mention New Post: Key words=Common Craft, Videos, Social Studies, Middle School, 19th Century History, Fu... by -- Topsy.com // Dec 27, 2010 at 10:59 pm [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by mrsdi, Edtech Feeds. Edtech Feeds said: New Post: Key words=Common Craft, Videos, Social Studies, Middle School, 19th Century History, Fu… http://bit.ly/g9YyDH by @paulbogush [...] Reply Sally // Dec 28, 2010 at 10:39 am This is great! When we get back to school the students are finishing up t

he Pioneers Violin, 1971, directed by B. Stepantsev, Soyuzmultfilm. A Nazi soldier tries to force a young Soviet boy scout to play a German song on his violin. Instead he defiantly plays the [then] Soviet national anthem, The International, and is shot by the Nazi. Fyodor Khitruk: Patriotic themes existed and were included into the plan of Goskino (the State Film Committee)...We werent pushed to make films based on these themes, but the political repertoire was put together by what they approved or did not approve, as in feature films and literature. The Pioneers Violin probably wasnt promoted by somebody. They didnt write the scripts on Vasiliev Street [Goskino]. As I remember, Boris Stepanstev who made this film, made it honestly thinking it was needed.Category:Film & Animation

But we can still be civil. It's easy. We can trade ideas instead of insults. We can vow to not say things online we wouldn't say to someone's face. We can put away our phones and pay attention. We can think before we speak or hit send. Join us and spread the word.

Excellent PDF resource for teaching critical inquiry. Includes: lesson plans, blackline masters, and readings.  A very clear explanation and process for nurturing better quality thinking in the classroom from teachers and students.

Looks like a useful guide by an experienced history teacher. Might be good for homework or a lesson activity? I'm focussing at the moment on training my students with 'historical thinking.' I find it much more useful a model than the 'critical thinking' models so common these days, and the results are promising. If anyone has any tips I'd be most appreciative...

Education historian Diane Ravitch makes the case for changing the way we think and talk about public education

Think back to a time when you were growing up and something big was going on in the world. What did you hear about it? What misconceptions did you have? We want to hear your story.

Host: Joan Neuberger, Professor of History and Editor, Not Even Past Guest: H.W. Brands, Dickson, Allen, Anderson Centennial Professor of History, UT-Austin After the chaos of the American Civil War, Congress and lawmakers had to figure out how to put the Union back together again-no easy feat, considering that issues of political debate were settled on the battlefield, but not in the courtroom nor in the arena of public opinion. How did the defeated South and often vindictive North manage to resolve their differences over issues so controversial that they had torn the Union apart? Historian H.W. Brands from UT's Department of History reflects on this issues and how he has dealt with them in his thirty years of experience in teaching about Reconstruction: "It's one of the hardest parts of American history to teach, in part because I think it's the hardest to just understand."

Almost every US History teacher tells students about Manifest Destiny, boiling down an explanation of the term to about eight words in a bullet point of a 18 slides presentation that students dutifully copy and recognize out of four other distractors in a multiple choice question. This is the article the phrase comes from - teachers should be forced to read it and explain why they think their teaching of the phrase does any justice to history at all