I
recently responded to the blog of Melissa Seideman, a Social Studies teacher in
Cold Spring, NY. The title of her blog
is “Not Another History Teacher: History and Technology: a Perfect pair.” I found the purposes of her career and blog to
be rather inspiring and apropos: “My goal is to help my students fall in love
with history and technology the way I have.
I believe that technology reaches students in a way that other mediums
can not [sic]. It ignites a fire, a
desire to learn, and gives them the ability to express themselves in meaningful
ways …. My goal is that my blog can provide teachers with resources that can
excite a student’s love of learning. I am a strong advocate that technology can
meet student needs, engages them, and help them to be the best learner they can
be.”
Ms.
Seideman's post “Documentary Series: Gold Fever” presented a resource, a video series
on the Discovery Channel about the California gold rush in the United States in
the mid-nineteenth century. I informed
her that I was reaching out to a “fellow history teacher who values technology
and its ability to engage students.” I
also inquired as to whether she knew about “Big History”—about the Big History site and Big History series presently
on the History Channel (H2).
I then defined it for her: “Big History
looks at history at different temporal and spatial scales from the Big Bang to
the present (with some conjecture for the future), and includes science and
other disciplines in the study of history.”
Next, I provided her with further reading: David Christian’s Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History;
David Christian’s This Fleeting World: A
Short Story of Humanity (an abridged version of Maps of Time); Cynthia Stokes Brown’s Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present; and David Christian,
Cynthia Brown, and Craig Benjamin’s Big
History: Between Nothing and Everything. Finally, I provided her with the
episode title for a Little Big History (LBH) about gold and why people have
come to value it as presented on the History Channel (H2) last Saturday
evening, November 9, 2013: “Big History: Gold Fever.”
Having
recently watched the episode and viewing part of the series that she presented,
I thought that sharing the LBH about gold would include me in the professional
learning dialogue that she seemed to value.
In fact, in addition to the blog, she is a “co-leader of #sschat on
Twitter ... an engaging chat with wonderful social studies
teachers on Monday Night’s at 7 PM EST.” Unfortunately, because my response is very recent, it is still “awaiting
moderation.” Nevertheless, I have given more thought recently to making blogging part of my teaching in the future. Below is a screen capture
of my comment:
From what I know about hearing some of your classmates talk about Big History, this could be something that you push beyond just Social Studies teachers. Much of of the history can be filled under "Science" as well. I probably would not use this as a main unit as I would already struggle to get through the mandated content. I'm glad that there's a whole series available electronically that I could provide to my students as an extra resource. Using the technology of videos, I hope that it lowers the cognitive load to gain information of these large scale and somewhat abstract topics. In that way, the activation energy for inspiration is lower.
ReplyDeleteI had a conversation with another previous MACer who started a blog for online resources for people to use as you have in this blog post. She mentioned that it definitely helped with her job search come April. I think I will start doing the same.