BITE: Beaver Information for Teachers and Educators and KIT: Kayak Information for Teachers

If you are visiting the blog from our newsletter please take a look around. Feel free to email any questions you have or leave a comment. You can do so by clicking the comment button under each post.

Over the course of the summer we will be working through some new programs with Kayak and The Beaver magazine, so check back often and follow along. Check out the links below as well to some great conference information.

Every two months we send out an online newsletter for Teachers based on The Beaver and Kayak magazines. The newsletter contains lesson plans, articles from the magazine, and links to other great sites. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter just send me a quick note with your name, school, province, and grade level and I would be happy to sign you up.

The Future of Education

Today I attended the first day of a five day online conference "The Future of Education." It was a terrific series of thought provoking seminars on how technology is being used in Education around the world.

Ironically enough this world wide conference is being organized from right here in Winnipeg by George Simens, the associate director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba.

Presentations are run through Elluminate and are being recorded so if you missed anything you can check out the saved editions. I found the program surprisingly well suited for online discussions and quite flexible, despite some sound issues. It was really fascinating to see other websites, youtube videos, and blogs being brought into the discussion as we were listening.

I was particularly interested in the presentation by Professor Sugata Mitra who studies education technology in the UK. His discussion of information technology in remote and rural Indian communities was an important reminder about how technology should provide opportunities as opposed to barriers based on geographic and social exclusion. His study of self-organizing structures is particularly suited to the online community, and would be of great benefit to help groups across Canada connect.

Dave Cormier's presentation was also excellent and I was particularly interested in his discussion of Disposable Learning objects as it pertains to history books and websites. I still have to go back an listen to the presentation again to get the full scoop, but after sitting in I felt like my technology grasp went up tenfold in a short period of time.

Still so much to learn, so little time.

The Conference goes on until Friday and all the topics are being posted online. Looking forward to more great discussions!

K12 Online Conference

The K12 Online Conference has just released it's 2007 info. It is an online conference held in October 2007 that explores using technology in the classroom.

I'll have to do some exploring of my own through the site and you can view all of the 2006 presentations as well. A great site and one definitely worth taking a look at.

Expo 67

The June/July issue of The Beaver features a story about Expo 67. I've been searching around on the internet for resources for teachers.

It's interesting on the 40th anniversary of expo to see how new technology and old technology are combining to commemorate the event. Suddenly home movies, photo albums, and primary documents are available to the public. That album or shoe box full of home movies and pictures is now a great source.

Check out this great family album of classic Expo 67 pictures on Flickr, apprently found from a stray photo album. Another great album from Jason Yoder. Suddenly you can also relive the Expo 67 Construction as well with a new and very cool photo image feature.

YouTube has also gotten into the act with home movies galore - from the Welshman, the Family video, and by Boat. It's interesting because Expo is one of the first events where people had wide access to personal camcorders and camera's. It's this amazing historical resource that is just beginning to get started.

Check out the Expo Lounge Blog as well, a great online site/exhibit to the wonders of Expo. All of these cool sources have me very excited about working on some projects of my own over the summer and putting together my digital teachers guide for the new year in September. All these sources are available to create online digital exhibits, and the primary sources are often sitting in our own homes.

All of these sources and a few more will be included in the June/July issue of BITE: Beaver Information for Teachers and Educators.

Banned from Blogging

I've been working with Linda Marynuk, an Aboriginal Education Support Teacher with the Winnipeg School division, on starting a blog for with several teachers. Linda has been terrific and has really taken up the project. It is the first chance I've had to help integrate blogs into the everyday use for classrooms. Unfortunately teachers face added hurdles when starting a blog.

Linda, like most teachers, has been banned from blogger.com and other blogging sites. School boards no doubt want their teachers to focus on teaching, but in the process have taken a valuable tool out of the hands of teachers.

We are working on some solutions to the problem as it stands and I will keep you up to date on the process. For now we are working from home to get around the safeguards put in place, and hopefully the blog will be up to full steam very soon!

Re-Launch of the Digital History Blog

Well it has taken a while but we are officially re-launching the digital history blog. Somewhere in the hustle and bustle of every day life the Blog got lost a bit and it is about time it returned so keep an eye out for more recent updates in the world of digital history and educational practice.

UNESCO World Heritage Site

I'm doing some research about Vikings which were featured in the December/January Issue of The Beaver. The UNESCO World Heritage Site actually has a really cool education section. The website itself is still being worked on a bit, but it does have links to an educational kit all about World Heritage Sites and activities you can do in the classroom. The kit is also available in French and English.

If you're doing units on heritage, community, multiculturalism, etc. this is definitely something worth checking out. And if you sign up on the UNESCO site you can get a free map!

History Podcasts

Well we checked for a pulse and it turns out I am still here.

I've been burrowed away for a little while working through the busy Christmas rush, but I'm also working on a few new projects here. One thing that has been in the back of my mind for a little while now is creating history podcats.

Admitedly there is a lot online at this moment already in this area. A quick search on Google brought me to a few examples such as the Baseball History Podcast. There you can learn about Arky Vaughan - Yes the Arky Vaughan. It is actually a fun website for baseball junkies, and I would definetly include myself in that category.

I'm really interested in trying to get more academic history out to the general public. Professor Bob Hackett has his own website with History podcasts. Good stuff and actually a neat interview with Bob can also be found at Small World Podcast.

But by far the best History podcasts available online, and the thing that got all of this running through my head to begin with, is The Ongoing History of New Music. Even if Alan Cross got this started for Radio, it is an amazing program that every public historian could learn from. It's edgy, smart, educational, and entertaining. Check it out if you're thinking of getting into the podcast realm.

I would really like to get more professors, in particular with Canadian History, to provide their lectures for online podcasts. I was also thinking that for students busy running around or going to the gym could listen to lectures as they go about their day. You could also create specific topic podcasts, as Bob Hackett has, so students can study specific topics.

Taking this back into the public history world this also might help individuals who are visually impaired to still have access to publications about historical topics.

We're going to do some fun stuff here...

OHASSTA

I just got back from the Ontario History and Social Science Teacher's Association annual conference that took place this weekend in Toronto. I was a great chance to see what kinds of projects people are working on, and lots of online material. There was also a great presentation about the work being done by the Critical Thinking Consortium, more on that later.

I was really interested to see how interested teachers were in primary sources online. I attended a workshop from John Myers, OISE, and Lisa Singer from the Ontario Archives. They have a new website that they have just launched that puts together lesson plans and primary sources. It's fun stuff and I think it really ties well with the idea of teaching about what historians do. You can check it out here.

One of the teachers asked how they would find information to cut through the multitude of primary source websites that are now being produced. Thus I've created a new list of the best primary source websites on the net. The list will keep growing so check it out often.

It's funny though, after all of these cool projects I realized that there is less out there for teachers interested in teaching students how to create their own digital projects. This is a big focus of my own work with the History Society newsletters. It's a creative place on the web, and as I have said before, there is no reason why science should have first dibs on technology.

Enewsletters

A little bit about some projects that I'm working on right now. I am the Education Program Coordinator for Canada's National History Society. It's a new position and my main project right now is developing a series of online newsletters that contain articles from The Beaver:Canada's History Magazine and Kayak:Canada's History Magazine for Kids.

The newsletters are pretty cool and allow the History Society to share content with a wide range of teachers and educators. It's neat to think that even just a few years ago a similar newsletter would not have been possible. But more than that it's a fun opportunity to also help teachers get more familiar with web based projects with educational goals.

I've started working on creating a series of blogs related to the material in The Beaver. This hopefully will just be the start of many more such projects. In one of the upcoming issues I hope to expand a project that I worked on this past summer with Professor Bill Turkel. In that instance we used Google Maps to map back issue of The Beaver magazine, locating individual articles by place. You can check out the example of the work here. Hopefully in the future we can use this program to create easy and fun projects that teachers can use in the classroom.

For more info on receiving either free newsletter please give me a shout at jralph@historysociety.ca

Digital History Education

Welcome To the Digital History Education Blog.

Did you ever notice when you were going through school that everyone always talked about "Science and Technology." What did science do that earned it access to all new forms of technology. Increasingly new and exciting ways of using techology to teach about History and the past are making their way into the classroom.

Websites, Blogs, and online activties all lend themselves to learning about history in an engaging and interesting way. This blog wil explore the possibilities and uses of technology in the classroom.