I'm glad everyone could make it to today's
DocsTeach session, our fourth uh series and we're really going to be focusing
today on choosing an activity, and we'll get
right into that. Now if you don't know what DocsTeach
is, if this is your first session that you're attending,
DocsTeach is the online tool for teaching with documents from the National
Archives. This is the fourth in our series of
webinars, and we actually are going to be
extending it a couple more, but so far we've talked about assigning
activities, finding activities, finding primary sources, today's focus is
really on choosing an activity, how to find the type of
activity that really fits in with the skills that you're focusing
on, that really fits in with your current
needs, how you're teaching in the in the current you know remote learning,
distance learning environment. And i'm thinking when i'm thinking about
choosing an activity i'm thinking whether it's
you're going to be creating your own activity,
modifying an activity, or using an activity that
the National Archives educators have created or another
educator has created. So finding that right type of activity that works
for you. We'll be getting into modifying and creating
activities in our next two webinar topics,
I'm sure we'll get to that near the end as well.
But today is really you know broader to kind of explore the different types of
activities that the National Archives has,
what skills they focus on and how you can use them with your students.
Okay, so this is DocsTeach.org and we're going to start by looking at
the activity tools all the different tools that DocsTeach
has just by clicking on menu, activity tools and
all tools, and this brings up a page that describes the 12 different types of
activities, kind of templates in which you can put
primary sources into to share with your students.
It's essentially, even though there are 12 different types, whenever
I share the website with teachers I I kind of share the fact that it's
really two broad categories you can break it down
into and for you know lack of a better term,
shorter activities, activities that in the typical classroom environment
might be good for you know a short formative assessment,
to a do now or the you know your beginning activity in a class
or a unit, um or something you would do at the end
of a class period, and then the longer activities which might be the entire
unit, sorry the entire lesson or even multiple day lesson.
And in our current environment, obviously that gets changed around a
little bit but still it still makes sense to kind of
divide it into shorter and longer activities.
So the shorter activities are all ones that involve
just one or maybe two different documents, primary sources, and most of
them are here right at the top of this list, the analyzing documents
tool, this involves one primary source and if
you're really focusing on building that analysis skill in students
it's, it's pretty appropriate for that. Then a lot of the other ones that are
kind of the shorter activities fall under this umbrella term
of focusing on the details, we have focusing on the details
discussion topic we just put up a document
and put a question below it for students to think about
or comment. Kind of similar to this compare and contrast the only difference
is here you have two documents that you want students to kind of
look for similarities and differences between, and kind of
you know, have a dialogue with each other the two documents,
and then you have focusing on details: spotlight,
zoom crop, and white out/black out, which start to modify
documents a little bit in some ways by either highlighting
certain information, which is what the spotlight tool does,
obscuring some information-the white out/black out tool,
or you know literally cropping it down zooming into a small portion-the
zoom crop tool, and these all kind of require students
to focus on particular details to really kind of
you know build up their analysis skills but also to try to
figure out what it is the document it is that
they're looking at and to try to pull out you know
particular facts, particular dates and information
to really understand um that particular document. I'm going to
show one of these styles in a second the last one that only uses a handful of
documents is here at the bottom, interpreting data, which is pretty
powerful if you're looking at charts or graphs or
tables and you want your students to really
interpret that historical information, a lot of teachers also
use this for kind of putting, because you can put
little annotations and questions on the document, they use this for
political cartoons and other types of records too.
But all those focusing on the details activities
use only one or at most you know two primary sources
and some really basic questions. And in today's environment when we're
doing so much you know work using Zoom or
Google Meets and different, you know technology, these
these might be activity types where you could literally demonstrate
directly in front of your students, this might be one where they have
another tab open they're doing the activity while they're on a meeting with
you, or it could be a short homework
assignment. Everything seems like it'll work now but
short homework assignment before you have a discussion about it
in class the next day. I'm going to show you two
of these types of activities to kind of give you
a sense of what they look like as a student, this is
the teacher kind of tool description page about it
it lets you know a little bit about the particular type of activity, it gives
you learning objectives if you really want
for this analyzing documents tool, if you want them to internalize the process
of analyzing primary source documents this is a pretty helpful tool
to be able to do that.I'm just going to go
in to kind of show you what one of these activities looks like,
which one did I want to show, yeah this is the teacher page for it,
It kind of gives you a sense of you know what level it's
thought to be for, what grade level how you know step by step how to do in the
classroom even approximate time you might need for it,
but as a student or if you were
projecting this you know via Zoom or google hang,
google meets or something, this is the link
this is how it would look to students doing the activity. So you have here
a document, the title of this activity for students is "What is the Highly
Secret Matter" and there's instructions here, "take a
minute to examine the document then answer the questions
that follow," and you can zoom in here you can see this is a letter from the
War Department to the President talking about you know
that they have to have a meeting to discuss something that's very
important, if you're studying this time period, World War II era
in the classroom this could be helpful you know content-wise,
but then the rest of the activity, this is a
digital version of our our tried and true
document analysis worksheets so you can see questions here
where students could you know look at the document,
if they're doing it you know completely remotely
check off information-describe it etc, if you were just sharing it
with your students via google hangout you might
you know, provide the questions to them in another means and
kind of walk through, walk through the actual activity.
But it's a fairly short activity, both to
physically do in front of your students, but also if you were to create an
activity like this it only involves picking
a primary source and then all of these questions
except for a couple that we added that are kind of content-specific
to this particular question, all these questions
are all populated by the the form itself. So a lot of teachers
use this if they're getting their students to do
really basic primary source analysis, and it's a good it's a good starter for
that or even just to kind of build that skill that's
really the the focus you want to do in the activity,
or if you only have a short amount of time that you really want to engage your
students in it. So that's the analyzing documents tool,
I'm going to close these windows and go back
here to that tool page, I want to show one more of the shorter
types of activities to give you a sense of what
they look like and if, this one is a tool called zoom/crop where you
take an image, you take a map, you take some document usually
I would say more more often than not, visual
and obscure some of the information, only show a small part of it, to have your
students really focus their attention and try to
find clues or details that might help them understand what that entire
document is and they might end up noticing things
that they wouldn't have noticed if they were not looking at just that
small part of the document. So i'm going to bring up this activity
and share it to you as if you're doing it with your students, this is one that
might be more appropriate for elementary school age students, but you
have here "Finding American Symbols," there's a
prompt here, "you will see just one part of the picture, what do you see?
what do you think it represents? After you've answered guess what the whole
picture will be when we switch the view." So you have this image here, I've done
this with students, you know in in the classroom
and they, you know, will look at things they'll see it looks like a bird they
see some letters they see some some stars or something above the head,
they don't have the entire document but then when they click on
"switch the view" they get the entire in this case the Great Seal
of the US, and if you were teaching about symbols, if you're teaching
you know even this is a great tool to use with
political cartoons or photographs and you want them to focus their attention
on a small aspect of it before seeing the entire
image. And I guess i didn't mention this in the last
activity, but just like before, we've talked about this
last week with how you can actually get the work that
your students are doing, so if they were doing this as
a homework assignment or if you were doing this not
displaying it to them, but they were doing it on their own there is
a follow-up question here they can type in their name,
email address send you a response that could go
straight to your email, when you have an account at DocsTeach,
or you can even, you know, set it up as you know sharing the whole activity
via google classroom or whatever other learning management system
that you use and there's a whole other
15-minute webinar that focuses on that that
is up on our YouTube page and here on DocsTeach as well.
but if you, these types of activities, again the shorter
activities for a lack of a better term, if you just want to build
a particular skill of analysis, if you want to be able to present things
to your students, they only involve one document.
If you want to modify or create your own they're fairly easy to get started with
and we're going to share some of that information in our next two webinar
sessions later this month that we'll get into
creating and modifying activities, but since they only use one document
they're fairly easy to do that. The other activity types
are the ones that involve a bigger group of primary sources and they focus
on other kind of higher order skills for the most part.
I'm going to show one of these, but we have finding a sequence where students
are asked to place primary sources in the correct
chronological order or to understand a sequence a process that has
you know first, second, third etc., step
so students have to look for dates and other information.
These types of activities as you're going to see are not ones that i think
really work for you to you know literally do with
your entire classroom for the first time in a
Zoom or Google Hangout, this might be a longer term assignment, if you're
assigning activities you know that might take you know
longer chunks of time and then maybe on another day you're
kind of going over their choices in a
in a Google Hangout or Zoom meeting, this works for that, so students are more
working on their own and you're kind of reviewing things
later. So you know some of these like making connections
is to kind of see how a string of documents relate to each other
it's really good for DBQ style prep if you have AP
students that, we're less than a week away or so from the AP test, but even if
you're working with your students and you want them to understand how
primary sources connect to each other that might not seem as connected as they
do, mapping history-seeing how events occur
geographically across the country around the world,
seeing the big picture-which I'll show an example of in a second,
and weighing the evidence is great for argument writing if you want your
students to kind of look at an argument and see how different primary sources
help support one side or another in that
historical argument. But the one I want to share
with you now is from seeing the big picture
which if you are having your students review
a topic that you've focused on in the past you know, a few weeks
or even the whole year, it's a, it's pretty good for like a review style
game or as a summative assessment if you really want them to
take a big concept and and make those connections to it. It's
essentially a matching activity where students are expected
to match a document to an appropriate description or another
document and there are activities here that go
under this one tool, from very low elementary school
age students all the way up to high school, AP students.
I want to show one in particular an oldie but goodie, The Constitution at Work
Again as your students would see it, and you'll see right away that this might
not be an activity that you could display
for the first time with your students, though it could be something you would
review with them, but here you have an array of primary
source documents and different parts of the US Constitution
and students are asked to match that document to the appropriate
part of the Constitution, they can click on
the bottom part of the document and it brings up
the entire image in this case a drawing for a game board
that looks, it's got a forerunner of monopoly,
so students would look at that and then look for the part
of the the Constitution that relates to it,
not sure if people can see those kind of the pop-ups aren't showing up all the
time, but I clicked on the enlarge this window
and it says "Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science
and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors
and inventors the exclusive right to their writings
and discoveries" so that's the copyright/patent protection that
the Constitution provides Congress to do.
If you guys can see that window. Thn
they click on the document, they click on that description, they
click on the document and it causes those two
matched pairs to disappear so students might do this activity you
assign it to them, they do it on their own or
in small groups, who knows how they're they're talking to each other
and then they will send you their responses,
that in this question, "what are some of the major themes or big ideas found
in the Constitution?" but maybe you would review it
during your you know distance learning
system using Google Hangout or or Zoom or whatever you're using in the
classroom, but this type of activity and really all of the ones
that are under that umbrella term of the longer activities, the ones that use
a wide array of primary sources, don't really work I think
for the first time when you're you know, sharing it directly with your students.
So that's kind of a quick way going through
you know, thinking about what these different activity types are.
Before we turn it over to questions I know this was seen
earlier in you know, "Finding Activities," but you know if you're looking for a
particular activity on a particular topic
just by clicking on menu, and activities brings up the search page for it
and you can actually, besides just typing in particular terms, you can
just look for particular types of activitivities like if you want to see
all the analyzing documents activities, you can do that, if you want to
focus on a particular skill, like you're really interested in chronological
thinking you can turn that filter on, I'm going to close out the analyzing
documents filter, and you'll see activities that really do
that as well. And you know obviously these are
activity types that you can put in all different types of primary sources
you can modify things that we've created or other teachers have created
and we'll get to that over the next few weeks
in these webinar series.