Teacher Richard Byrne realized that many educators aren't aware of the wide variety of tools Google offers, nor what these products deliver beyond their main features. To help teachers best take advantage of Google's tools, he developed Google for Teachers, a one-stop manual on making the most out of Google products. In Part One, Byrne looks at Google Search, Docs, Books, News, and Maps and provides users with in-depth overviews of how each tool can be used in the classroom. Part Two examines other (and less well-known) tools such as Google Sites, Custom Search, Alerts, Bookmarks, Groups, and Calendar.
Published digitally using Yudu and DocStoc, Google for Teachers provides visual aids that help viewers better understand the multiple functions of various Google tools. Together, these guides focus on lesser-used tool options: publishing an online quiz using Google Docs, creating placemarks on Google Maps, and embedding books into a class blog.
Both parts of Google for Teachers can be accessed by using the Yudu and DocStoc viewing window, or by downloading the documents to your computer. A print feature is available in each option and Yudu and DocStoc also allow users to read the documents in fullscreen, zoom-in, and search within documents.
One of the first considerations to keep in mind while viewing this free resource is that because it deals with technology, some of its suggestions may be out of date. For example, a recommended secondary search option in Google is the "wonder wheel"—a feature discontinued by Google. We recommend having Google open in another window or tab while reading the document. Yudu allows users to make notes while browsing the document, which is very helpful.
Nonetheless, the suggestions Google for Teachers outlines are well worth reading. For example, the ability to use Google Docs to construct quizzes and publish them online is a wonderful asset for teachers. Quizzes published online can help teachers create practice assessments for students who are struggling or have missed several days of classes. In addition, each Google Doc (like a Microsoft Word document) is able to produce grade-level and readability indexes through the Word Count feature. These types of functions are often unknown to educators. Byrne also highlights how using the Google Translator tool in a Google Doc can help English Language Learners (ELLs) better understand the history-specific content being asked in a quiz. [Note: Despite the benefits of Google Translator mentioned by Byrne, the end results of these translations are rough and often clumsy. A better approach for the history teacher is to develop assessments that are linguistically simple—for students across the learning spectrum—but ask students to think at a high cognitive level. In other words, complex ideas do not require complex language.]
Overall, Byrne's expertise working with Google products as a Google-certified teacher makes these guides extremely useful for the history educator. The visual demonstrations makes learning new features simple and easy to understand. Most importantly, Google for Teachers is a guide developed with the student in mind. History teachers can make easy connections with the suggestions provided by Byrne, who is also a U.S. History and Civics teacher.
Get started learning about Google's tools with Tech for Teachers entries on Google Docs, Google Forms, Google Maps, and Google Earth.
Chairman of Aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution Peter L. Jakab explores the Wright brothers' invention of the airplane and how the brothers were able to achieve flight when scientists and engineers for centuries had failed to do so. Jakab discusses the impact of the airplane on the "world at large"—particularly in 1905, three years after its invention, the year Einstein published his most notable papers.
Tom Crouch, Chairman of Aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum, discusses the Wright brothers' invention of the airplane, placing it in the context of the centuries-long study of flight and of the enormous impact airplanes have had on human life.
Professor Paul L. Penfield, Jr., follows the history and development of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since the department's founding in 1913. He discusses the contributions of the program to science and technology at large and the possible development of the program in future.
Scholar and author Emily Thompson describes the study of aural history—the study of not just music, but of noise and soundscapes as a whole, what cultures heard and how they heard it—and discusses the aural culture in the U.S. from 1900 to 1933. She looks at how sound at the time was influenced by technology and at the consumption of sound, focusing particularly on architecture's influence on sound.
A panel of professors and conservators details the excavation and recovery of the Civil War Union ironclad warship Monitor and the Confederate submarine Hunley. The panel discusses both the history of the two vessels and the technological challenges the excavations faced and face.
Archivist Deborah G. Douglas details the story behind a one-inch-square piece of fabric from the Wright Brothers' flyer stored at the MIT Museum. She explores the creation and flight of the flyer, considering the community that supported and contributed to the Wright Brothers' invention, and the impact of that invention on popular imagination and society.
Congratulations to Jennifer Orr, 1st-grade teacher at Annandale Terrace Elementary, Annandale, VA, and writer and Teacher Representative for Teachinghistory.org! On Sunday, June 24, she received the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)'s Kay L. Bitter Vision Award for Excellence in Technology-Based PreK2 Education. The award recognizes a PreK2 educator whose work has had "a significant positive impact on technology use in education."
Orr, a National Board Certified Teacher, came to teaching early elementary after teaching fourth and fifth grades. Passionate about using technology in the classroom, Orr met the challenge of finding innovative ways to use digital tools with her new, younger, often preliterate students. While upper elementary students could jump into blogging, creating Wikis, and using other tools that require strong reading and writing skills, first-graders needed a different approach.
". . . the most critical thing for me as a teacher is connections," says Orr. "Technology offers my students connections that I could never provide them. They can connect with learners around the world, with content about anything, and with experts in any field." Orr finds ways for her first-graders to make these connections using tools like VoiceThread, Wallwisher and PrimaryWall, pocket camcorders, digital cameras, an interactive whiteboard, and video creation programs. She blogs about her experiences at her blog, Elementary, My Dear, or Far From It, and here at Teachinghistory.org. You can watch her in the classroom and in DC with her students in Beyond the Chalkboard.
Orr appreciates that ISTE offers an award recognizing the challenges of bringing technology into the early elementary classroom. "Previous winners are women I immensely respect, many of whom have served as mentors to me as I transitioned to teaching primary," says Orr. "I feel so honored to join them in this."
"Globalization" is a term that educators often overuse. Perhaps influenced by books such as Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat and Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World, the term gained attention in the late 1990s. A more globalized curriculum opened new possibilities for U.S. historians and educators, but suggestions on how to implement such an approach were often vague and muddled.
Between 1997 and 2000, the Organization of American Historians and the New York University Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History organized the Pietra Conference to address globalization in history education. The basic premise of this project was to move beyond a treatment of the nation as "self-contained and undifferentiated." If educators could reassess the interrelated aspects of historical events, transnational themes could become a far more integral part of U.S. history courses. Emphasis, then, could shift towards the varying contexts and scales of experience in U.S. history. Students exploring British America, for example, can view the 13 colonies within the context of empires and the Atlantic World. Native Americans in the West could be studied in relation to other indigenous groups of the Pacific Rim. Likewise, the American Revolution could be analyzed as the initiating event of a global system of democratic revolutions—especially influential in the hemispheric context. The New Deal, for its part, could be presented as one example of a transnational age of social politics.
Sounds interesting, right? Although some international contextualization has seeped into the U.S. history curriculum at the collegiate and secondary school level, the story of the United States remains rather insulated from the larger world. Moreover, U.S. educators rarely take advantage of digital communication tools, like Skype, in order to conference with other teachers around the world concerning the various ways that history courses are taught in global classrooms.
Taking advantage of research travel that took me to South America, I interviewed the social studies curriculum specialist at the Argentine Ministry of Education in Buenos Aires. Addressing a variety of topics—technology, national standards, revisions and changes in social studies curriculum, and thematic instruction—Mabel Scaltritti provided an insightful look into the national educational system and what U.S. and Argentine social studies educators can learn from each other.
Every year, history, geography, and human activities (sociology, economics, law) are taught in social studies. Grade levels are grouped in three-year cycles, where each one builds on the previous one. The first cycle (grades 13) introduces basic social studies themes. Units are thematic in nature, covering ideas and traditions like migration and "carnival" for example. The second cycle (grades 46) focuses on the intertwined relationships between economics, politics, history, sociology, and other areas of the humanities. Students analyze specific historical moments for their complexity, and are expected to demonstrate an awareness of how various factors shape the past. The third cycle (grades 79) delves deeply into an array of topics and focuses on multiple interpretations of historical events, such as Fascism, Nazism, the French Revolution, the Great Depression, Peronism, Keynesian economics, and the Cold War, to name a few. In the last years of high school, students choose from a variety of specialized courses on modern history (20th century) and current events.
Much like in the U.S., curriculum initiatives that originate at the federal level are secondary to state/provincial and local directives. As such, a student in a remote area like Jujuy (near Bolivia) would have historically learned a different curriculum than another student in Buenos Aires. In 2003, President Nestor Kirchner began a process to homogenize education under national standards known as NAPs (Núcleos de Aprendizaje Prioritarios, grouped in the aforementioned three-year cycles). (The last years of high school are absent from NAP standards because of their college-prep and vocational nature.) According to Scaltritti, adherence to NAP standards in social studies is largely determined by the emphasis local administrators place upon them. As a result, Argentine university professors in the humanities complain about the declining quality of high school graduates, many of whom lack sufficient historical thinking skills and basic knowledge about civics, laws, and past events.
Despite the effort to streamline curriculum on a national level, the teaching of history remains text-heavy and largely frames the past in patriotic and positivist terms. Scaltritti believes that Argentine educators should instead focus on an approach to history that emphasizes the complexity of human relationships through an understanding of economic systems, communities, and the role of geography. In other words, less teaching of an idyllic and homogenized version of the past and more heterogeneity in the history curriculum. The lack of material resources and qualified faculty, coupled with varying interests and timetables by local school administrators, makes a national reform initiative almost impossible in the social studies.
The Argentine NAPs for social studies do not contain a specific focus on U.S. history. However, revolutions and power are themes addressed in the second and third cycle. As such, students assess the significance of the U.S. revolution in the context of American independence movements from 1776 to 1821. Students are expected to answer questions like "what is a revolution?" and analyze why European conquest and independence movements failed, or succeeded, in various areas of Argentina and the Americas. For a specific course on U.S. history, universities offer the only options for students. In grades 112, the U.S. is included as an important actor during global events like the Economic Crash of 1929, World War II, independence movements, and the Cold War.
Some training is starting to take place on the use of digital tools in the classroom. The primary emphasis is on how technology allows students to find quality primary sources. Although some schools are beginning to use laptops in the classroom, schools are woefully underfunded and not typically wired for items like smartboards or overhead projectors. Older teachers have also been hesitant to embrace a move towards more technology in the classroom. Universities and "tertiary institutions" of higher education also ignore technology in preparing future teachers.
Although differences between the Argentine and U.S. social studies curriculum and educational systems are readily apparent, we can also learn from the similarities. The challenges teachers face in Buenos Aires are not vastly different than those encountered by my teaching colleagues in Washington, DC. Barriers to a more sophisticated, and digital, history curriculum are also the same: lack of financial resources, local administrative concerns that override curriculum needs, and a need for more qualified trainers and faculty.
One lesson U.S. educators could learn from their Argentine colleagues is to consistently integrate the story of the U.S. into a more transnational context through thematic instruction. Although U.S. history is important and unique in many ways, an insular approach limits the complexity of America's relationship to the world over several centuries. Rather than minimizing the influence of neighboring countries, U.S. history teachers could emphasize, for example, the interconnectivity that made New Orleans and Ybor City (to name two examples) key cities of a Caribbean world.
With state and national standards already reflecting a variety of themes and objectives that encourages global connections, the goals of the Pietra conference do not conflict with the teaching of U.S. history. My conversation with Scaltritti only illuminated the need for more open communication between history educators across the world, which could go a long ways towards a more dynamic U.S. history curriculum for students.
What happened to Civil War farmers who went home to take care of the crops and then came back to fight?
Very few Civil War farmers went home to take care of the crops and then returned to fight. The American Civil War was far longer and more destructive than virtually anyone expected. At the outset of the war, many eager volunteers signed 90-day papers, evidence of the widespread belief that the war would be brief and nearly bloodless. Instead, the struggle stretched nearly four full years. Between 1861 and 1865, the Union and Confederacy mobilized more than three million men for the fighting and suffered some 600,000 deaths. The war remains the bloodiest conflict America has ever fought.
One of the reasons for the dramatic increase in the length of the war, the size of the armies, and the magnitude of the casualty rolls was the technological improvements in agricultural production that occurred in the decades leading up to the war. In the eighteenth century, the food demands of the population at large served as an important limit on the amount of manpower that could be mobilized into the army and on the length of time those armies could be maintained in the field. In those years, a nation that diverted a large proportion of its agricultural labor force to the military and kept it in the field for months at a time risked deprivation and starvation on the home front.
A bevy of technological improvements that appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century—iron and steel plows, seed drills, cultivators and, most importantly, mechanical reapers and threshers—made it possible to increase the amount of food that could be produced manyfold. By the mid-1800s, two men equipped with a horse and the new agricultural machinery could produce as much grain in a day as twenty men could harvest by hand using sickles in the late 1700s. Together, these changes dramatically altered the proportion of the population required for agricultural production. Three-quarters of American workers labored on farms in 1820; by 1860, fewer than three in five worked in agriculture.
The massive shift in the demographics of food production helps explain how the Civil War armies could place so many men under arms and keep them in the field for years on end. The massive armies that contested the huge battles between 1861 and 1865 could fight so long in part because their members were not needed at home to plant and harvest crops: the divisions could stay on campaign without threatening the larger society with starvation. And the substitution of mechanical advantage and animal effort for human muscle meant that farm labor no longer required adult men. Younger children and women could now perform many of the tasks that formerly demanded male workers. In the south, the labor of four million African-American slaves helped support the armies in the field and freed the white population to continue fighting. While neither side offered exemptions to farmers, the South did institute the Twenty-Negro Law, which released a plantation owner or overseer whom managed more than twenty slaves from military service—powerful evidence not just of slavery’s importance in maintaining the Southern economy and war effort but of the persistent fears of slave insurrection.
This is not to say that soldiers never returned to their homes and farms during the war. Furloughs for the troops were not uncommon, often doled out as a reward for service. (In the winter of 1863-1864, a Union Army desperate for reenlistments offered a 30-day furlough to any soldier willing to sign on for an additional three-year term.) But those furloughs rarely coincided with the agricultural cycle: campaigning season usually ran from the spring to late fall—precisely the months of planting and harvesting—and armies found it easiest to grant furloughs once the armies had gone into winter quarters. Soldiers generally viewed furloughs as a chance to visit loved ones and to escape the stifling discipline of army life for a brief moment.
In the South, the deprivations of war affected individual soldiers more acutely. Non-slaveholding white farmers—those who farmed small parcels of land for sustenance, as opposed to large planters growing cash crops—frequently joined the army in the belief that they were defending homes and families from Yankee invasion. As the war dragged on, and Federal troops pushed deeper into the Confederacy seizing crops and blocking transportation lines, many of those families suffered intensely from the scarcity of basic supplies. When letters arrived from home telling of wives, children, and siblings threatened with starvation, many of those rebel soldiers elected to leave the ranks and return home to provide for their families. Those desertions—officially a capital crime in the eyes of the military system—became more and more widespread in the last years of the war; historians estimate that as many as one in three Confederate soldiers had deserted by the final months of the war. Very few of those deserters returned voluntarily to continue the fight.
Burns, Ken. The Civil War. WETA, 2002.
McPherson, James. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. Oxford University Press, USA, 1998.
Civil War Preservation Trust. Civil War Primary Sources 2009.
McPherson, James. The Civil War Era Collection 2002.
St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector and Albert E. Stone. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1984.