100 Years Later: Ways to Teach About the Titanic

100 Years Later: Ways to Teach About the Titanic With The Times – NYTimes.com.

100 Years Later Ways to Teach About the Titanic With The Times - NYTimes.com

So, the Titanic has sailed back onto our horizons, for at least a little while.  The link above will take you to the New York Times education page.  On it, you will find links to primary sources from the Titanic’s sinking, including articles from the paper’s archives.  There are a variety of suggestions, such as: making scrapbooks or mock Facebook pages (try MyFakeWall.com) which are neat ideas–easily incorporated into an existing history program or as a stand alone activity.  And, this brings up an important decision for history teachers wanting to do something with the Titanic.

What are you doing with the Titanic: Is it an opportunity to take advantage of history being covered in the news, or does it work well with what you are covering in your class already, or is it something that you simply feel compelled to cover, or is it a means to actually cover current events?  Another relevant question: Are you going to simply do a fact-finding project, a history project driven by a particular question, or a project that evaluates other disciplines either in an isolated way or in a multi-disciplined approach, such as science, engineering, or sea-exploration?

I always consider the anniversaries of particular events as interesting opportunities in teaching history, but they are also potentially awkward prospects that could unsettle the flow of the class if they do not fit in logically. Sometimes there is no real way to introduce these moments without a natural gap, such as in-class activities just before a major test or due date while students are working on tasks at home, or immediately after such a date when students are a bit exhausted.

Of course, if you are already discussing the era, then so much the better.  This is a great opportunity to evaluate Edwardian issues of class, the lingering perception of invincibility for imperialists and innovators of industry, the era’s perceptions of gender, an evaluation of the early 20th century’s media and connection with perceptions of disaster, or a more general consideration of communication developments in the age.

One of the resource links from the NY Times article: RMS Titanic Victims of the Titanic Disaster

If you are going to utilize the Titanic tragedy in class, do it with a purpose.  Be cognizant of the event’s social and cultural cache.  It may be the perfect moment to capture and wow students with a degree of interest that is sometimes hard to achieve in history classes.  Try assigning each student a person through the stories, wooing them into the drama of the past.  Provide them with multi-media sources to explore the moments they are reading about.

If your student, Tommy, reads about a young lady who gushed over dancing in the ballroom and seeing the view from her balcony, and then let him explore the underwater scene of the ballroom, today, there is a real opportunity to draw him into an experience he may have never had before.

If your student, Natalie, follows the excitement and worries of a family who put everything into this trip to immigrate to America and their struggles to keep the family together during the tragedy, complete with subsequent census records for the family after the survivors made it to the States, she may develop an interest in the nitty-gritty she never knew she was capable of sharing.

If your student, Devon, takes a look at one of the socialites who is in the newspapers leading up to the voyage and then considers his or her experience during the voyage and its disaster, they will get a personal “in” and learn a little bit about class status in the era.

This is a potential trigger moment, that can really open the world of the past in a way that other events often do not, especially for older students who are more likely to know something about the Titanic.

Titanic 100 Years -- National Geographic Channel

Additional resources:

The NY Times piece from above: 100 Years Later: Ways to Teach About the Titanic With The Times – NYTimes.com.

The BBC has interviews with survivors–great primary sources, but don’t forget the effect of history and time impacting the memory of those interviewed.

Teachinghistory.org provides a useful movie review of the James Cameron’s Titanic which is short enough to be used easily in conjunction with the movie (also complement the Hollywood experience with primary sources!!).

HistoryTech.wordpress.com offers some tech resources for Titanic lesson plans.

Larry Ferlazzo also has a collection of “The Best Sites for Learning About the Titanic.”

The History Channel’s website also has a series of articles, clips and interactive materials on its Titanic Topic’s page.

Ultimately Successful: a Jesse Owens Fake Wall

Jesse Owens (James Cleveland Owens) Fake Facebook Profile - MyFakeWall.com

After the challenges experienced with the librarian in our library class, we were able to regroup and recoup our losses.  Following the in-class debacle, I sent out e-mail with instructions, including the following:

1. Find 5 facts: birthplace, education, people in his life (family, friends, coaches, mentors, opponents, etc.)
2. Find a photo (either find one online and e-mail it to me or take a photo with your smart phone ans send it to me)
3. Find 3 primary sources–from those sources find a) America’s impression of Germany in 1936, b) America’s impression of Jesse Owens, c) Germans impression of Jesse Owens, d) Marylanders impressions of Jesse Owens

Out of this we have a great a product in the form of a Jesse Owens wall at MyFakeWall.com that didn’t have as much student collaboration as I would have liked, but is a nice finished piece that they helped build more indirectly.  The wall posts focus narrowly on the American track teams’ experience in the 1936 Berlin Olympics–commonly referred to as Hitler’s Olympics, with good reason.

Students dug up sources that provided the profile information and some of the pictures.  The wall posts were built up mostly from primary sources, in the end only three of these references was found by the students.  Most of the wall posts came from a series of interviews that were done in 1986 as part of the LA84 Foundation’s legacy project which interviewed past Olympians, including those who participated in Berlin in 1936.

It was a successful learning process.  The students will come out of this with a clearer sense of what constitutes a primary source versus a secondary source.  They will also have learned the possibilities and limits of internet searching for research material.

I learned some more about MyFakeWall.com as well.  It is pretty stubborn about pictures.  A lot of the offered features didn’t work very well.  If the site has a preference for a media type it does not specify such a one anywhere!

What we missed out on as a class was asking the students to assume those roles of the various sources.  That creativity of trying to think from the perspective of someone who is foreign to you by means of time and geography, is an essential skill for thinking historically.  It also working through the challenge of recognizing what is justifiably familiar versus what shows up as a “false-friend” and leads your analysis astray.  That opportunity was missed because we did not end up working on the wall together in class.

I do want to thank Glenn Wiebe!  His Tip-of-the-Week post put me onto this opportunity.

A tech blog — helping students write better and think creatively

Today, is a quick post about some of the teacher-assist websites out there that I am going to try this semester.  At the end of the semester, I will write a follow-up and let you know how it went.

Turnitin.com

The purpose of this site is to facilitate grading based on a question of the paper’s originality.  This is intended to catch deliberate plagiarism and accidental or careless paraphrasing, while improving citation practices.  I plan on using this for my students’ first drafts on their final projects.  The site also has a built-in peer review program, but I’ve decided to use the site below and assign the peer-review project for the second draft.

For the time-being, I am using the two separate sites to help keep the drafts separate in my mind and because I want to play with both before I commit to one or the other.  If you are a fan of paperless or paper-minimal, the site appears to work with you because one simply uploads the papers and the site does its thing.  It also has a grading feature, which I am a little loathe to use–maybe if I was teaching larger numbers and no TA I would consider it, but it seems like a cop-out and I don’t see how it saves you time grading on content.

SWoRD

At the University of Pittsburgh (archrival to my hometown school, WVU . . . but, we’ll let that pass), a website has been developed for peer-review facilitation.  SWoRD is short for “Scaffolded Writing and Reviewing in the Discipline” and was constructed by a multi-discipline team to set up a platform for peer-review projects.  The site conveniently supplies professional papers that have been written to ascertain the value of such a program.

My intent is to use this program for the final paper project after they have submitted a rough draft to me for content and originality (see above section), this will be the second draft before the final submission.  Following the site’s advice, the reviewing by the other students will be graded, as well.  Wisely, the instructor creates the rubric.

As someone who always tries to teach history as authentically as possible–not just content, but the field–I like the idea that the students are engaging the project on the same level and by the same methods as the pros do.  Also, I am a believer that being forced to read someone else’s writing improves one’s own reading and writing skills.

MyFakeWall.com

So, I stole this from History Tech (who it looks like snagged it from someone else), but I definitely plan on using this as extra credit or an in-class assignment!!  MyFakeWall.com creates a fake FaceBook wall, which offers some great possibilities to one’s teaching repertoire–particularly for us historians!  While there is a lot of stupid.. er.. I mean “fun” stuff on the website (which can be distracting), there is also already some fun history content stuff on their–so, don’t let your students steal any of it!  One good example is Martin Luther’s Wall.

I think there are a lot of good opportunities, here!