Perspective and thoughts on the past and history education
- The Coordinates & Context of the Past
Showing students how historians use the coordinates of people, place and time, can help them understand the context of the past they are exploring. - AI and Omelets: Perfect Together?
There’s thousands of ways AI can help develop instructional materials, sometimes it can help extend and embellish good ideas also - Textbook Mistakes Help 4th Graders Think
A textbook’s mistake can launch complex geography discussions among 4th graders when paired with interesting questions about the distinction between natural features and human features of the Earth - Stealing Books to Teach Reading
What’s the difference between a school district using AI to support the teaching of reading, writing and thinking, and a school district using a stolen car to teach driver’s education? Shouldn’t we think about this? - Information Literacy through Current Events
You can make a current event lesson an information literacy exercise by driving students through the text. Today’s New York Times and the BBC demonstrate how you learn about an event might have a greater effect on your understanding of it than the event itself. - AI Discussions You Won’t Find in PD Sessions (But Should)
Industry and academic discussions regarding AI’s risks—like its power to reshape truth and the need for human verification are not part of K-12 consciousness, even though they are readily available. NotebookLM and a few minutes with a Stanford Law School panel discussion can help bridge that gap. - The Impossible Calculus of Teaching the American Revolution
How can we say some facts are essential if we don’t know enough of them to make that choice? Maybe we shouldn’t teach the Revolution as a static canon of essential facts, but rather a living inquiry that we are still pursuing ourselves. - In Awe of Coincidence: Connections Across Time
Every once in a while, facts, names or references that I haven’t thought about in years or just learned will come to my attention in a book, essay or video, then they will appear again a few days or in some cases just a few hours later. These coincidental connections test the bounds of believability. - Making History Human
Stepping off the speed train rush through the curriculum to tell personal stories of the people in the past can bridge the gap between them and students’ experiences. History is a deeply human endeavor we can use to make sense of our own lives. We owe it to students to show them how. - Using Recent Executive Orders as Primary Source Documents
The language of recent Executive Orders targeting history education and institutionalized public memory provides strong material for students to analyze, while simultaneously presenting them with thought-provoking questions about what they’ve learned and what they think they should be learning. - Firewall of Memory: When the Past Speaks In Defense of Democracy
When history is under assault, preserving voices from the past that speak to us now becomes an act of resistance. - Time Traveling Conversations Can Go Anywhere
How would you explain a traffic light to Benjamin Franklin? How about carry out pizza? Learning about the past is a mind-altering experience that changes how we think about the present - Learning Opportunities in the Stories behind Geographic Naming
Like them or not, there’s a lot of learning opportunities in the year’s worth of changes crammed into the last three weeks of Executive Orders - Faking It for the Holidays
Hiring a decorating service to string up lights on your house for the holidays is like using AI to write – the product looks good, but it also looks a little fake – and you gain nothing from it. - What if I told you……
The magnitude of change in the few years following 1858, 1938 and 1985 is barely comprehensible, let alone believe. Even though we can’t predict our future, we can get a better sense of scale of what we’re facing in comparison to other periods of massive change.