Teaching Canada's History

Tomorrow Canada's History Society is launching Teaching Canada's History, a special publication of The Beaver: Canada's History Magazine. The magazine explores how Canada's best teachers and educators are sharing the history of our country with young people.

We have terrific features including Peter Seixas discussing historical thinking, Catherine Duquette looking at controversies in the classroom, Eric Langhorst using technology to spark learning, Anne Tenning on the importance of teaching about residential schools, Rose Fine-Meyer on Local History, and Blake Seward on Remembrance in Canada. We also had wonderful contributions from Joe Stafford, Helen Raptis, Charles Hou, and Vicky Lapointe.

What I'm most excited about is the inclusion of links within the print version of the magazine. Many people have put print publications online, but they always lack the interactivity of a website. We jumped ahead by bolding words in the text and tagging images in the print version, letting readers know what else can be accessed through the print version.

Teachers are a really difficult group to crack and we've tried to create an extremely high value product that is uniquely shareable. Selling a lot of teachers magazines is always going to be a challenge, but we hope that by reaching the largest audience possible, this will also support sales on newstands and through our website. It's got the portability of print with the interactivity of a digital magazine.

For the last six months this project has been my main focus. It has been an extreme pleasure and honour to work with these talented educators and the editorial staff at the Beaver magazine to make this project work. A special note of thank you as well to James Gillespie, who has put together an incredible magazine with a terrific look and feel.

Please take a look through the issue and let us know what you think! I'll have lots more to say about the magazine in the coming days and weeks ahead.

Canada's Best History Teachers

Canada's History Society recently announced the 25 finalists for this year's Governor General's Awards for Excellence in Teaching Canadian History. We present the award each year to six teachers from across Canada. I'm always amazed at the new and inventive ways teachers develop to teach young people about Canada.

Take a look through the list here and let them inspire you in your classroom. The six recipients will be announced on November 20th, 2009.

Canada's Steve McQueen

Working on a special magazine over the past few months, I've had a chance to delve into the images at Library and Archives Canada more and more. I'm amazed at the depth of the collection that is available online at the moment. Searching is fairly easy, and you can narrow your search by selecting only those images which are available online.

The photos contain much of the history of Canada, but I wanted to share this picture. Anyone who has every had the Steve McQueen great escape poster on their wall will recognize it right away. I think this is the best World War Two photo of a Canadian soldier I have ever seen. Let me know what you think or if about other images from the collection that you think are pretty awesome.


Personnel of No.2 Provost Company, Canadian Provost Corps (C.P.C.), talking with French civilians, Fleury-sur-Orne, France, 20 July 1944.

Will my son skype with me?

I know it doesn't appear so on the blog, but things have been busy of late. My wife and I celebrated the arrival of our son Jack on August 12th, and we have been very busy since learning all about parenthood.

Last night though we had the chance to video Skype with my son's great-grandparents. It's pretty amazing to think that my wife's grandmother grew up in Cape Breton in a single home without electricity or running water. And here we are now video conferencing with them to introduce them to their newest great-grandson.

I can't imagine what my own son will be doing in 80 years from now, but it sure seems like the future will have to continue to build on this technology.


We have some really fun projects coming in the fall and the new year, so keep an eye out. I promise things are still going here.

Befuddled Twitter Connection

The posts here have slowed a little of late but I promise we are working on some fun projects. I've also been getting more engaged with Twitter (you can find me @jralph). This happened a few weeks back, but was a great example of little connections on Twitter.

I saw a post from @mrpuffin, another teacher I follow, that he was working on Immigration posters with his students. I quickly sent him a note with links to Immigration posters in the back issues of The Beaver that he was able to use in the class. Other teachers who follow him also saw the post and followed up.

MrPuffin never would have sent me a note to say what he was doing in his classroom, but by communicating what he was doing we found an easy connection that improved the quality of education and the student experience. You can read MrPuffin's account here on his blog Befuddled.

You might also want to check out some of his thoughts on organizing the Red River Heritage Fair and technology, as well as some of his students stop motion videos like this one below. They look great!

History Canada Game

I have spent the last few days playing around with the History Canada Game. It's a scenario within the Civilization 3 game that explores the early settlement of Canada.

The group behind the project has just received a significant grant from the MacArthur Foundation in the United States to continue with the project development.

If you have Civilization 3 on your computer you can download and play the first scenario now. I purhcased Civ 3 online at Gamersgate.

I would be interested to know what experienced classroom teachers think about the project and the game. 

Thinking in Mind

Any day you find a new blogger focusing on history and digital media is a great day. So yesterday was a lot of fun unpacking Thinking in Mind, a history and digital media blog from Neil Stephenson. Neil is a grade 6 and 7 teacher in Calgary, Alberta.

It's wonderful to have a Canadian example of the great work that can be done with History and new media. Please take a look at the Cigar Box Project his students are working on which sounds like lots of fun. I also really liked this program Glogster. You can find Neil's assignment for using it to create historical timelines.

Really fun work and enjoyed learning about these projects a lot. I've added Thinking in Mind to my blog roll and the famous history teachers who blog section.