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.
Concise Chronological Context
Placing the topic event of a lesson in a contextual calendar that centers that event in the chronology of what happened just before and what happened just after helps understanding
A Better Reading Diet
If you’ve had it with reading whatever’s coming out of corporate and social media’s chum machine, then reading Walter Lippman, Neil Postman, and Carl Sagan are better for your reading diet right now
Notebook LM’s Latest New Thing – Catch it before it’s old news
If you’re a teacher who happens to stumble across this post and haven’t yet heard a AI generated podcast from Google NotebookLM, you can be the first in your school or district to impress your colleagues with the AI’s latest shiny thing.
The War of the Worlds and Fake News
Prank your students with a Halloween history lesson framed around the story of a 23 year-old using new technology to prank thousands of people in 1938 and leave them a little more skeptical of what they hear and what they’re taught.
Exercising Reading Skills with one Electoral College paragraph
Practicing reading with this one paragraph helps students recognize the broad horizon of options available to writers when they make choices to use certain people, quotes and events to give you an understanding of the past.
Having Fun with Primary and Secondary Sources
Primary and Secondary source identification is a staple of history lessons, but like history, the difference isn’t as clear cut as it first appears. This simple exercise will generate interesting discussions with students and adults.