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.
When fact checking doesn’t check out
Shifting back and forth between the book and the primary sources upon which its drawn often yields interesting results. Not only does this capture dozens of primary sources for lessons, along with side stories, and powerfully illustrative quotes, it also exposes a book’s mistakes.
What’s in a name?
Labeling people, events and eras marks a difference between the history as it operates as discipline and history as it appears in the classroom. The vocabulary we use to talk about the past has a historiography all its own. Exposing students to the power-plays that advanced one label over another is admittedly harder and more abstract than memorizing a list of terms, but it is far more rewarding.