Group items tagged

The current feature lesson plan provides teachers with many examples of how to teach their students about a particular period in history, an event, or a person/group of people.

It is great that the National Park Service organizes their lesson plans and follows the National Standards for 5-12 Social Studies so teachers can see how it fits into the objectives they are required to follow over the course of the semester/year.

The gradual decline of funding priority for education may not be immediately felt but I think the effects later down the road could be bad. I think we take education very much for granted.

I wonder who he is talking about specifically with this statement? European countries? I wonder how much of an impact in that is because many of them have free higher education, or at least highly subsidized. But then again their tax rates are outrageous. The great thing about our system is that we have a lot of choices, so it's hard to compare in many ways too.

I think this is a very interesting example, it always seems to be a question of equity or choice.

This website was created and maintained by the Virginia Center for Digital History, the Carter Woodson Center for African and Afro-American Studies, and the University of Virginia. You can contact these folks about the project via email.

The site emphasizes a great holistic approach to studying an African American community in Virginia after the fall of the Confederate States of America and up through the first half of the twentieth century. They include oral histories, maps of Charlottesville, census reports, city records, political materials, personal papers of residents, newspapers (including two African American papers), as well as images.

For educators, I think this might be a great way to teach Jim Crow and/or Reconstruction in the South through exploratory web quests. If the students have access to computers in a school, they could investigate the website at their own pace and answer essential questions or pose questions themselves for others to answer. Also, teachers could use the primary sources as classroom aides for their students to examine.

Looks like it's pretty real, informational.

The For teachers link shows teachers how to use this in classrooms

Something weird happened with my sticky notes, so it'll all be in this one here.

The Explorers A to Z link sends you to the explorers page, where the real stuff gets done.

Easy to search for time periods to find first hand accounts of the time periods.

Gives historical photos as well

AND sounds...very wide appeal

How are you thinking about using these resources?

So for the first half of my time at McKinley we had a class called Global Perspectives and nobody knew what we were supposed to teach because it was brand new. My teacher thought it was a pain but I thought it was such a cool opportunity to have a lot of teacher freedom. They had a book that taught them about different contemporary issues around the world but it was really negative. So in order to balance out some of that negativity, particularly regarding developing countries, I think it would be cool to choose a cool travel book about some of the places. Especially if you were in a school that had a English/Social Studies department relationship. Some of the books wouldn't be very good to use but out of 50 titles, there were a few that sparked my interest.

This is one that sparked my interest because it is written by a historian. I think what he did was so cool. He journeyed down the Yangtze river and tied the past and present, which is the only way to truly understand a sense of place and cultures.

I really like this part of the website because it keeps track of current events in economics and gives you related lessons. My understanding is that economic education works best when you give the kids real-life examples. My teacher likes to bring up the healthcare package a lot and it works because the students know that this is a big issue and it puts context to things.

NCEE (National Council on Economic Education) likes to use real life context in their lesson plans. There are simulations, group decision/problem solving solving, etc. They believe in the education principle of learn by doing (Dewey) and I think economics needs real world context even more so than other subjects.