Teaching Current Events? There's a (GIS) Map for That...

I continue to be amazed with the amount of (free) resources available for introducing students to (and engaging them with) GIS. If you want a quick overview of what GIS is and how it relates to geography, consider this video. You can also click on the "GIS" tag/label to find my other entries on this topic.

ESRI's Storytelling Maps page

Storytelling with Maps
I was recently introduced to a few ESRI resources that help students learn about past and current events through maps and GIS data. An excellent resource is ESRI's Storytelling with Maps. There, you can explore topics ranging from Fracking /Shale Gas Boom to The Real Pirates of the Caribbean to Health Care. You can even explore costs by state under the Federal Healthcare Exchanges initiative (i.e., Affordable Care Act/Obamacare). Exploring these topics digitally through time and space is a great opportunity for students to begin learning how to interpret data and maps.

ESRI's Time and Place Module: Indian Removal Act of 1830

Additional Resources
ESRI also has some additional resources worth mentioning. Their "Time and Place" modules include topics such as the Dust Bowl and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Students are provided maps and documents as a way to integrate information from a variety of sources to form an argument. (Notice the potential Common Core connection here?)

GIS Jobs
Finally, those not sure why GIS should be part of the curricula in secondary schools need only be reminded on how many public and private sectors use this information. ESRI provides several snapshots of these GIS-related jobs, too (e.g., farming, military, retail stores). P-12 education is catching up with this approach to geography, and these (and other) free resources are making this topic more accessible to schools on tight budgets. Happy exploring...

August 28, 2013: 50 Years Since the March on Washington

Today, bells rang at 3pm EST to commemorate the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. More specifically, ringing the bells at three was to signify the importance of one person and one speech, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream." Fifty years later, this powerful speech has become the central focus for the march and civil rights in the U.S, yet a lot of other speeches and individuals were (and are) equally important.

In this post, I thought I would share some resources related to this important date in history. First, I want to highlight an invaluable online video resource, The Teaching Channel. There, you can find hundreds of classroom videos of lessons specifically tied to the Common Core Standards. Inside this archive, you can find about 14 videos related to the Standford History Education Group's project, Reading Like a Historian. At the Stanford site, you can find over 75 quality PRIMARY SOURCE lessons for U.S. and World History.

Here are some lesson ideas for today's historic event from both sites:

1) Teaching Channel's Corroboration Lesson Video for March on Washington (note the full lesson is linked in the lower right-hand corner when you scroll down the screen).

2) Stanford History Education Group's Corroboration Lesson Plan for Civil Rights Act of 1964, which includes an excerpt from the speech John Lewis gave at the march in 1963.

T.A.L.L. Presentation - June 6, 2012

Here are resources related to my presentation for the T.A.L.L. Conference.

Link to Prezi presentation.

GET THE LESSON
Link to a full description of the lesson for the 1830 Indian Removal Act.

CREATE A BOOK
Link to UDL Book Builder for creating sources with scaffolds.
(I have links to additional primary source books/lessons in a previous post.)

CREATE A PRIMARY SOURCE LESSON
Link to DocsTeach.org lesson examples and templates for creating your own.

GET EXAMPLES OF HISTORICAL THINKING UNITS
Link to four units at Historical Thinking Matters.
(I talk more about this source in a previous post.)

GET COLLECTIONS OF SOURCES
Link to Stanford History Education Group's collections of primary sources for over 70 lessons.
(I talk more about this source in a previous post.)

Link to the History Project's Document Source Problems Collection.
(I talk more about this source in a previous post.)

Google Earth - Record a Tour

I imagine the typical day at Google starts with a simple question: "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" I have endlessly enjoyed the benefits of Google Scholar, Google Book, and, of course, Google Earth. A great option I recently learned about Google Earth is the record tour option. Here is a quick video that gives the overview for this option: http://youtu.be/iuz6P2ftWB0



Sounds like a good assignment for my social science methods course...

More GIS

I've admittedly been away from my posting for too long, and the number of amazing resources out there continues to proliferate. I have a lot of catching up to do, so here's a start...

Let's talk about Geography Geography is not memorizing states and capitals or regurgitating the locations of countries around the world. Sure, that may be an important skill for some, but this discipline deserves more serious attention in PreK-12 schools.

Recently, I've had students working a lot with GIS, and this is an area I want to continue to explore, and here's why. Consider the image below. It shows the types of public and private industries that use GIS. Each link takes you to different stories/testimonials about how companies, government agencies, etc. use GIS. For example, "Retail" takes you to stories about how companies that range from Nike to Petsmart use GIS for their business.

ESRI's look at how industries use GIS.

As this site illustrates, just about any job students may be interested in is using GIS in some form. Granted, if we source this website, we will find that it is produced by ESRI, a major GIS software developer and clearninghouse. Their bias aside, GIS is still an important tool we should be exposing students to in our classrooms. But how?

Below are a few more resources to help GIS become a major focus in the classroom. Some sites are just cool tools, others are full-fledged curricula that let students use GIS as an invaluable research tool.

Where are People Moving?
An interesting GIS map Forbes Magazine compiled allows the user to see where people were moving to and from in 2008. For example, if you click on Jackson County, IL, you see arrows reaching the county from various other counties around the US. When you "mouse over" these other counties, a pop-up will reveal how many people moved to Jackson Co. from that county in Oregon and how many people in Jackson Co moved to Oregon. This is a great tool for teaching the theme of Movement with a contemporary lens.

Interactive Forbes Movement Map

To find free GIS maps similar to this one from Forbes, read this mapcruzin.com blog entry.

Tornadoes Everywhere Google Earth is another great tool where we're seeing a lot of universities and private interests use to create interactive maps. One example of a topic of relevance here in the Midwest is tornadoes. Recently, Joplin, MO was in the news as one of the deadliest tornadoes in recent history. If students want to explore this topic further, they can use the interactive map at tornadopaths.org. Here, students can view where tornadoes touched down within the last 48 hours, on this day in history, or near a specified zip code. Clicking on the tornado icons that appear on the map allows the user to see the tornado's path, level of destruction, and fatalities.

Map from tornadopaths.org

If teachers are interested in keeping up with the other types of GIS-type tools are out there, they can check out this amazing blog: www.gearthblog.com.

Google Earth Blog

GIS for History
This site deserves its own entry, but I'll at least mention it here. At gisforhistory.org, students (and teachers) are provided with four full lessons: Slavery in America, The Great Migration, The First Census: America in 1790, and US Expansion. In each module or unit, students work with primary source documents and an interactive map to explore certain questions such as "What factors made this migration possible?" (Great Migration Question). Scoring guides are provided in the teachers section. Click on the graphic below for more information on how to navigate these incredible maps.

Examples of map features from gisforhistory.org

Book Builder Project at ATE

This week, I presented my Book Builder projects at the Association of Teacher Educators annual meeting in sunny Orlando, FL. As promised in my presentation, here are links to the books I have created with a 5th grade teacher to use in her classroom. Here's also a link to my Prezi I used for the presentation.

They Book Builder lessons are:
1. Washington Crossing the Delaware
2. Indian Removal Act (5th Grade Version)
3. Slavery in the U.S. Constitution
4. Indian Removal Act (7th Grade Version)
5. Body Ritual of the Nacirema - Notice that it only has text. The students' task for this reading was to illustrate the Nacirema for the "cover" of this book.

viz. A Blog for Media Literacy Pedagogy

via viz

While doing an image search for an unrelated project, I came across this informative blog, vis. Visual Rhetoric, Visual Culture, Pedagogy, from the University of Texas. As the subtitle explains, this blog has a nicely arranged series of posts related to a curriculum I usually refer to as media literacy on my blog. Namely, this curriculum focuses on the creative techniques advertisers, governments, or any other creators of propaganda use to inform or persuade an intended audience.

Granted, at first glance, some of the content found on the viz website might seem "too philosophical" for elementary and secondary social studies students; however, the concepts presented in several of the its posts provide a helpful structure for any social studies curriculum.

Here's what I mean:

In the secondary social studies classroom, media literacy pedagogy usually makes a brief, yet underdeveloped and unconnected, appearance during a unit on World War II. I've seen what feels like countless lessons on WWII Propaganda Posters. The usual routine is to show students a series of posters and to point out how countries dehumanized the enemy. In other cases, this lesson amounts to little more than an interesting slide show intended to "break up" the usual lecture routine. Such a poster activity is no doubt a great way to introduce students to visual culture, but these activities usually lack a coherent connection to the rest of the curriculum or the students' everyday lives, for that matter. For example, consider the possibility that some of the techniques (e.g., guilt, peer pressure) governments used for WWII propaganda posters are also found in a commercial for a candy bar.

via viz

An example of pedagogy related to WWII posters on the the viz website is under the "assignments" section with a lesson titled "Visual Rhetoric and Violence." There is also a great series of related posts tagged "Propaganda." The central message throughout these posts and assignments is an emphasis on comparing "arguments, strategies/appeals, and effectiveness." Another website/resource that can guide the "strategies" question is "It's No Laughing Matter" from the Library of Congress. (See previous post for more detail.)

Anyway... I just found the viz site, so I have some more exploring to do to see what I can use for my methods course.