Ruffing ITInformation Tech and Education…Tryin’ it, Lovin’ it, but sometimes just Ruffin’ IT.

With tomorrow being Independence Day I am thinking back to an activity I do with fifth grade students called “My America”. It is a virtual field trip of sorts and they go to a variety of historic sites and “take pictures” and write about what they learned at the site. We put the finished project together as individual videos using PhotoStory, patriotic songs, narration. This is in technology class, not the “regular” classroom.

Being a great lover of history and geography, in fact I taught grades 5 and 6 social studies for about 15 years, I really love to get “into” history. I love to find ways to “make it come alive” for the kids. But in the virtual field trip I discovered that there are some things they just cannot glean on their own, some things are not learned correctly in an independent fashion, and they really need an explanation. (Not a blinding revelation of course.) One of our stops was The Alamo, and it was one of the most difficult stops for them to come away with the correct understanding. I even used Assignment Builder and set up video links for them to watch for the various stops. But…they needed me. They needed me to interpret, explain, make comparisons, put things into context.  This was all an extension of the American history they were learning in their classroom, where they never got anywhere past the Revolutionary War. The next time they will encounter American History is eighth grade. They need a sense of who we are as Americans before that time.

One of the things I loved teaching about back in the day was the Constitution. I didn’t have much technology available back then (wait, did I have any?) but we still really got into it. I would have loved to make use of a great site I just saw today USConstitution.net 

This site provides information and lessons about the Constitution at K-3, 4-7, and 8-12 levels. In addition there are links on the Declaration of Independence and other important documents. I thought their monthly survey questions were pretty cool, a great thing to do in the classroom and then see how the class results compared to the online results at the end of the month whether you do it with paper votes, cell phones, clickers, or whatever. The site is not sponsored by the U.S. government but maintained by Steve Mount. I hope to explore it further and share it with my teachers.

God Bless America!

Image Citation: United States Constitution. Jupiterimages Corporation. 2006.
Discovery Education. 3 July 2009
<http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/>