Cindy is in the dissemination phase of her history grant. The idea is to extend the training first conducted with history teachers in Grand Forks to other teachers within the region. Today, the program involved an online experience with professionals from the Library of Congress.
No matter how extensive my background with technology, I continue to be amazed by experiences such as this – sitting in Grand Forks and interacting with people from the Library of Congress is pretty cool.
History teacher or not, the LOC is worth exploring. What a tremendous repository of resources and these resources are becoming easier to locate. While I have explored this site on several locations, the tour provided some new insights (perhaps things are being added all of the time). Here is a suggestion – consider exploring the Self-Serve Workshops.
The afternoon session was devoted to teaching with primary sources. This turned out to be less interesting and similar to other sessions I have experienced several times locally. Practicing the three stage analysis system with a couple of images – what do I see, what do I know, what do I think – was probably not the best use of a limited amount of time. This is an issue that has always troubled me in the development of teachers – given a limited amount of class time, should class time be devoted to working through examples. What can be assumed regarding the ability of educators to apply from the presentation and discussion of examples? Homework is one thing, the limited amount of time available when interacting with people from the LOC another.
The demo image follows. Like so many with a computer in my hands, I tend to get off track when not completely engaged. I immediately Googled “evacuation sale” and guessed the image was a forced sale by a Japanese store owner. It turns out the phrase brings up this topic at the top of a Google search. Was I doing history?
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