Social Studies/ History

Join Mr. Mac as he shares his digital textbooks that he designed. They are interactive with embedded videos, engaging pictures, thought provoking questions and projects for students to complete on their own. Each is differentiated as their are review opportunities and also links to go deeper as students follow their own interests.

Click HERE to access the site

Richard Byrne explains how to make interactive maps and timelines with Padlet below. Click HERE to watch the YouTube video.

Collaboratively Create Maps on Padlet

Padlet has been in my list of top collaboration tools for nearly a decade. I started using it with my students back when it was still known as Wallwisher. There are many ways to use Padlet from simply providing a place to share text notes to using it as a place to collect video samples from students. Late last week Padlet added another way that teachers and students can use Padlet. That way is to collaboratively create maps.

Padlet's new mapping tool is rather easy to use. To access it simply open your Padlet account and create click "make a Padlet." You'll then be taken to a list of template options including the new map option. Select the map option and you're ready to start building your custom map.

After selecting the map template you're ready to start adding multimedia markers to your map. To add a marker you can either drag one onto the map or use the search tool to have a marker added to a specific location.

The markers that you add to your map can include all of the types of media that you can add to any other Padlet wall. That means you can add pictures, videos, text, links, audio, and even documents to the markers on your map. Padlet even has built-in tools for recording video and audio. Students could use those options to record themselves talking about the places that they're adding to their maps.

Finally, like all other Padlet walls, the maps you choose to make in Padlet can be made collaboratively. There are a handful of ways that you can invite students to collaborate on a map. Those invitation options include sharing a public or private link, using a password-protected map, invitation via email, embedding the map into other websites, and sharing via QR code.

Click HERE to access Actively Learn

Click HERE to access the teacher overview video that will explain Actively Learn

Texts (and videos!) for ELA, Science, and Social Studies with scaffolds and higher-order questions

Find what you teach and great texts & videos to pair with it. Or add anything you like. Take whole class, small group, jigsaw, close reads, and more to the next level.

Text-to-Speech

Dictionary

Translation

Chunking

Scaffolding

Annotation

Discussion

Formative Assessment

Metacognition

Media

From Actively Learn's Blog:

Today’s English Language Arts teachers are tasked with creating a curriculum that not only meets Common Core and state standards but also engages students in class and prepares them for higher education and careers. They’re told that a curriculum should improve students’ foundational skills, teach close reading of complex texts, and include a volume of reading sufficient for vocabulary and knowledge building. All too often, though, teachers have little training or support in designing a high-quality curriculum, and many ask their students questions that don’t require close reading or citing examples from the text as evidence. Research shows that more than half of teachers spend five or more hours searching the internet, often outside of school hours, to plan lessons for their curriculum. Mandates, such as state standards, high-stakes tests, and prescribed curricula, may lead teachers to feel that they are not serving students in a satisfactory and effective way (Costigan, 2017).

A well-structured curriculum, however, can satisfy all these learning goals: engagement, skill building, knowledge building, deeper learning, and preparation for the kinds of rigorous work expected in higher education, careers, and life. Here are clear guidelines on how to build the best ELA curriculum for your students.‍

1. Create a unit that relates to students’ lives and explores complicated topics in a safe space. ‍

A good place to start is to explore a topic that is central to your students’ identities. A unit on immigrants who are finding their place in their new home, for example, can speak to not only immigrants in your classroom, but also to students whose family members are immigrants. Essential questions can create even more bridges into the content: by asking broad questions about the relationships between protagonists in these stories, students can connect the literature to their own family dynamics and friendships.

In addition, don’t be afraid to take risks with your topics. Exploring darker or more complex themes can resonate with your students in a deeply personal way. Students are drawn to the dark topics explored in contemporary young adult literature such as The Hate U Give, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Walk Two Moons, and The Fault in Our Stars. Connecting with a character’s struggles can help students learn about themselves, other people, and the larger world, and discussing a character’s survival after a traumatic experience can help them discover and articulate how to best move forward in their own lives. Complex themes like conflict, love, and grief are the stuff that literature, and life, are made of. By treating these topics with sensitivity, you can create a safe space for students to better understand their own reactions, reflect on their own difficult experiences, and learn how to talk about sensitive topics with compassion and respect. ‍

2. Assemble a collection of related texts featuring a variety of genres, authors, and perspectives.‍

Curricular units provide a great opportunity to teach students how to connect diverse texts and perspectives. Not only is this a big push from the Common Core, but it’s also good practice to develop the sort of analytical, comparative thinking they will need to evaluate sources and understand diverse perspectives in a hyperconnected world. A thoughtful curricular unit on teen bullying, for example, can feature excerpts from The Outsiders and Black Boy, a short story by Stephen Crane, poems by Maya Angelou and D.H. Lawrence, a recent article analyzing research on the physiological and emotional effects of cyberbullying, and a video describing firsthand experiences of being bullied. Choosing an engaging, diverse collection of texts from authors of different backgrounds, and featuring a variety of protagonists, will draw students into the stories and resonate with them throughout the course. What’s more, asking students to integrate nonfiction texts in their reading, thinking, and writing about works of fiction encourages them to make sophisticated comparisons of how genres differ and builds background knowledge that leads to deeper understanding of the literary texts. ‍

3. Guide students’ learning with a series of essential questions.‍

You can engage students from the beginning to the end of a unit with essential questions that are broad and universal, bring structure, and connect a variety of texts. In our unit on slavery, for example, we feature 21 fiction and nonfiction texts that we connect with a series of four guiding questions. We start our unit by asking one topical essential question: What were the relationships between enslavers and the enslaved like? This question—which is open-ended and engaging, invites higher-order thinking, and requires justification and explanation—guides the thinking and discussion for two short stories and a firsthand account by Frederick Douglass.

The unit’s next three sections feature a series of texts guided by more essential questions: Why is it important to read firsthand accounts of slavery? What did escaping slavery look like? What did culture and innovation look like to enslaved people? By answering these questions as they explore a series of texts, students build on their knowledge throughout the unit by reading, thinking, and writing about complex ideas and develop a deepening understanding of the effects of slavery on individuals and the larger world.‍

Use essential questions to engage your students, bring structure to your ELA curriculum unit, and connect a series of texts.

4. Choose rigorous content and use instruction that prompts students to look more deeply into the text.‍

Including a combination of complex literary texts, articles, and primary sources in your unit can better prepare students for the demands of higher education, careers, and life. Students will be expected to grapple with rigorous texts on their standardized tests, in their college courses, and in their future workplaces. Exposing them to complex syntax and structure, challenging vocabulary, and unfamiliar content will help them develop the reading and analytical skills they will need to grapple with legal documents, tax forms, and many other complex texts they will encounter as adults. Remember that challenging students with “frustration-level texts” (Morgan, Wilcox, and Eldredge, 2010) has been shown to increase reading gains, especially in poor readers. Texts that have more subtlety and depth inspire deeper thinking, analysis, and conversations—exactly the kind of activities students need to succeed in higher education, careers, and life.

For each unit, it’s important to ask students to dig deeply into their analysis. Helping them learn to carefully read, and reread, a poem or challenging text before answering your questions can lead them to access deeper layers of meaning. You can also ask them to compare and contrast two complex texts, analyze a chart that illustrates the unit’s theme, or describe how a related video illuminates or complicates an issue. To help struggling readers deeply understand complex text and participate more fully in group discussions, you can scaffold by providing definitions of key words and establishing context with brief background information. ‍

5. Ask text-dependent questions. ‍

The Common Core and state standards for ELA stress the importance of teaching students how to use evidence to support their thinking. In assigning writing assignments and research projects based on complex texts, ask questions that do more than require students to articulate their opinions and draw from their own personal experiences. Instead, ask them to answer a question using evidence from the assigned texts to make their points.

If you’re not sure whether your question is text-dependent, use this rule of thumb: if you can answer without having read the text, it’s not text-dependent. And if students answer the question without citing evidence to support their claims, challenge them to go back into the text to find examples. For example, let’s say that you’re reading “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” If you ask students a generic question about how individuals experience reality differently, you’ll probably get a wide range of tangents and musings. But if you ask them a text-dependent question like, “How does Walter’s view of reality impact his actions and relationships?” you can expect students to refer back to the text and be challenged to find evidence to support their answers. Another approach is to give them a sentence starter, such as “When Walter Mitty ____, it shows ___because _____.” Continually asking them to write evidence-based answers in short-answer questions will pay off when they’re asked to create longer essays and research projects that require the use of evidence to support multiple claims. Asking text-dependent questions throughout your unit can also help your students focus as they read, build knowledge, and deepen their thinking on topics that they hear about or experience every day, such as the natural world, technology, and violence.

At the end of the unit, your students will walk away with new information that is closely connected to their lives and be more skilled in thinking and writing about complex ideas, analyzing rigorous content, making meaningful connections between a variety of texts, using evidence to support their claims, and discussing sensitive topics. Your thoughtfully constructed units will help your students become better consumers of information, make better judgments, and be stronger readers and thinkers as they take on the challenges of the future.

Related:

Quick Guide to Topical Essential Questions

Latest Research Recommends Changes to ELA Instruction

5 Ways to Make Rigorous Content Motivating to Students

An ongoing document that teachers are adding their favorite technology sites and tools. Feel free to add your favorites, too. Click HERE to access the document.

CHECK THIS ONE OUT! AWESOME IDEAS!

From Eric Curts:

Click HERE for the latest resources, news, blog posts, links, and other helpful technology integration items. New resources will be added to the top, grouped by month, so you can scroll down to view previously added information.

Click HERE for another database of great ideas.

"One Pagers" are:

It’s pretty simple, really. Students take what they’ve learned—from a history textbook, a novel, a poem, a podcast, a Ted Talk, a guest speaker, a film—and put the highlights onto a single piece of paper. AVID first developed this strategy, but now it’s widely used in and out of AVID classrooms.

But why is this seemingly simple assignment so powerful?

As students create one-pagers, the information they put down becomes more memorable to them as they mix images and information. According to Allan Paivio’s dual coding theory, the brain has two ways of processing: the visual and the verbal. The combination of the two leads to the most powerful results. Students will remember more when they’ve mixed language and imagery.

Plus, one-pagers provide variety, a way for them to share what they’ve learned that goes beyond the usual written options. Students tend to surprise themselves with what they come up with, and their work makes for powerful displays of learning. Plus, they’re fun to make. Let’s not pretend that doesn’t matter.

So, assuming you’re sold on trying this out, you’re probably wondering what exactly goes into a one-pager?

Students might include quotations, ideas, images, analysis, key names and dates, and more. They might use their one-pagers to make connections to their own lives, to art or films, to pop culture, to what they’re learning in their other classes. They might even do it all. You’d be amazed at how much can fit on a single piece of paper.

Links of examples and more explanation:

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/one-pagers/

https://www.weareteachers.com/one-pager-examples-english-language-arts/

https://www2.ncte.org/blog/2018/11/the-magic-of-one-pagers/

The TimeMap of World History is made up of an Atlas and an Encyclopedia. The Atlas is for ranging quickly over wide periods of time and regions of the world. The Encyclopedia is for digging deeper into topics.

The TimeMap is not primarily for academics, though many do use it in their teaching. It is for learners of all ages, with a reasonable level of intelligence and a healthy dose of curiosity, to use and enjoy. It is designed to give such as these access to all the world’s history.

The website currently has two and half million users (and rising) a year. Like you, they are using this resource to expand their knowledge of history and their understanding of the world.

Heidi has compiled a great resource for implementing the new Social Studies Standards HERE

This lesson not only shows you how to make an Infograph, it also has an awesome way to set up a lesson using technology.

Click here to see how one teacher incorporates video, note taking, questioning, and designing an Infograph into her lesson.

Are you looking for maps either current day or antiquity maps for your classroom? This blog post will explain where to find maps for all ages.

Click HERE to find out more.

60-Second Civics is a daily podcast that provides a quick and convenient way for listeners to learn about our nation’s government, the Constitution, and our history. The podcast explores themes related to civics and government, the constitutional issues behind the headlines, and the people and ideas that formed our nation’s history and government.

Introduce your middle- and high-school students to a supercharged social studies curriculum. Big History Project is a free, online, and totally awesome social studies course that puts skills development and student engagement first. What can you expect to see? Amazing gains in student writing and critical thinking.

BHP delivers a big picture look at the world, and helps students develop a framework to organize what they’re learning both in and out of school. After they leave your class, students will have a better understanding of how we got here, where we’re going, and how they fit in. It’s a place that was 13.8 billion years in the making.

Proven impact. Big History students show clear, demonstrated gains in reading, writing, and content knowledge.

Free, open, and online. All lessons are instantly accessible, evaluated and updated regularly, highly customizable, and free to learners and educators everywhere. More than 1,600 teachers and 80,000 students are teaching and taking the course each year. Here are just a few sample course plans:

YEAR-LONG COURSE PLAN SEMESTER COURSE PLAN WORLD HISTORY COURSE PLAN

Skills-focused approach. Engaged students learn and retain more. BHP students develop a set of intellectual tools that help them think critically, tie together big ideas, and build informed arguments—and practice these skills across disciplines.

TEACHING GUIDE

Invested in Teachers. Teachers can spend a ton of time cobbling together curricula from free resources. That’s not BHP. This is a full curriculum complete with in-person and online professional development, a vibrant teacher community, and other free out-of-the-box tools that help free precious time to refocus on individual student instruction.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT TEACHER COMMUNITY TEACHER BLOG

Congress, Civic Participation, and Primary Sources Projects

The following interactive projects were developed by a number of organizations and supported by grants from the Library of Congress. Each project is intended to provide young people with engaging and meaningful opportunities to learn about Congress and civic participation using primary sources from the Library’s online collections. Read more about this program

Primary sources have tremendous educational power and can be used effectively in many different ways with students at all grade levels. The projects below reflect different organizations’ varied approaches to teaching civics using primary sources, and each has much to offer.

For more on effective strategies for teaching with primary sources, see the Library of Congress Using Primary Sources page.

DBQuest

Developed by iCivics

New from iCivics, DBQuest teaches history and civics through the use of primary source documents and evidence-based learning. It offers a platform, accessible with mobile devices, that reinforces evidence-based reasoning and Document Based Questioning by teaching students to identify and evaluate evidence, contextualize information, and write sound supporting arguments.

Case Maker

Developed by Bean Creative

Case Maker is a customizable system for inquiry-based learning for K-12 students using primary sources from the Library of Congress. Modeled after the ‘observe, reflect, question,’ framework developed under the TPS program, Case Maker guides students to challenge a question, collect evidence, and make a case.

Eagle Eye Citizen

Developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Eagle Eye Citizen engages middle and high school students in solving and creating interactive challenges on American history, civics, and government with Library of Congress primary sources in order to develop students' civic understanding and historical thinking skills.

Engaging Congress

Developed by the Indiana University Center on Representative Government

Engaging Congress is a series of game-based learning activities that explores the basic tenets of representative government and the challenges that it faces in contemporary society. Primary source documents are used to examine the history and evolution of issues that confront Congress today.

KidCitizen

Developed by Muzzy Lane Software

KidCitizen introduces a new way for young students (K-5) to engage with history through primary sources. In KidCitizen’s nine interactive episodes, children explore civics and government concepts by investigating primary source photographs from the Library of Congress. They also connect what they find with their daily lives. KidCitizen includes cloud software tools that let educators create their own episodes and share them with students.

Thanks to HistoryTech for the blog post -

Your students pick a character from 1787 and spend their time trying to get the Constitution ratified by the different states. The iCivics people created the following overview:

The ink is still drying on the new Constitution.

Will it become the law of the land or will it fall into the dustbin of history? The fate of our young nation is in your hands! Dive deep into the heated national debate over the future of a radical new plan for American government. Travel across the 13 states to hear from a diverse and opinionated cast of characters and use what you have learned to influence others through the social media of the time . . . pamphlets.

Can you be a ratification #influencer?

Kids can jump right in. Race to Ratify is designed for students to discover the big ideas at the core of the ratification debate while learning about the role of pamphleteering in the 1780s.

The game is also device agnostic – giving you the ability to play on laptops, Chromebooks, tablets, and phones.

Like most of the games that iCivics create, you also get a very handy teacher’s guide and something they call an Extension Pack with additional tools and resources. But, unfortunately, like some of the things that iCivics creates, it can be difficult finding all of these things in the same place. (Seriously, iCivics web site people. Is it so hard to create a single page with links to all of this stuff in a bulleted list? Just asking. For a friend.)

So . . . here are some direct links to the Race to Ratify things. Just remember, you’ll need the free teacher account to download the extra goodies and assign the game to the iCivics LMS – though your kids can always play without logging in.

• Race to Ratify game
• Teacher Guide
• Extension Pack

Social Studies Central is designed to provide you with tools, strategies, and ideas to improve instruction and engage kids in high level learning. You’ll find historical thinking lesson plans, helpful sites, technology integration tools, and links to my presentations. Be sure to check out History Tech, the latest in social studies technology integration, and the SSC Tip of the Week.

Google Earth is a free resource that you can use with any grade level and every content area. It is our earth, in globe form, complete with 3D imagery, roads, addresses, borders, access to StreetView images, data layers, a measurement tool, and elaborate and professional Voyager Stories. Donnie Piercey has an excellent set of resources for Google Earth on this site. The official Google Earth Education site is awesome too for inspiration and resources.

The Voyager Stories are my favorite. These are guided tours on a wide range of topics. Just click the ship wheel on the left menu.

Donnie Piercey has a WONDERFUL Google Site loaded with resources. Click HERE to access the Site

Great way to start with Google Earth.

Examples of tours using Google Tour Creator here.

When teaching about countries around the world, students often lose their perspective or don't have a base to make comparisons. The website "Your life in another country" will help students see the actual differences between living in the USA and other countries around the world.

US History Teachers -

On this site, constitutional experts interact with each other to explore the Constitution’s history and what it means today. For each provision of the Constitution, scholars of different perspectives discuss what they agree upon, and what they disagree about. These experts were selected with the guidance of leaders of two prominent constitutional law organizations—The American Constitution Society and The Federalist Society.

Even though this says it's an iOs and Android app, you can still pull up the information on your Chromebook. There are educational resources, lesson plans, and videos on the site. Also, the full Constitution and explanation.

Click HERE to access the site.

https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution#

Are you looking for a way to spice up your Social Studies class? Why not try HyperDocs. Click HERE to see some wonderful examples that you can use in your classroom tomorrow!