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.

10 Photos that Changed Canada

The Beaver magazine today is launching a special feature today called the 10 photos that changed Canada. It's a great feature about some of the definitive images that have shaped Canada. The article is available in the August/September 2008 issue of the magazine.

I wanted to point it out because not only is it a fun feature, but we also have several podcast interviews that I thought were particularly interesting this month. Ray Argyle talks about meeting Robert Mallandaine, who is looking over Donald Smith's shoulder as he pounds home the last spike - arguably Canada's most famous photo.


For anyone who can follow along, there is also a great interview in French with Robert Nadon, the photographer who captured the image of Pierre Laporte's body in the trunk of a car during the October Crisis.

And finally, you can also hear Ric Ernst discuss how the judges narrowed down their list of iconic images.

Quebec 400 goes digital

The Beaver magazine is launching it's special double issue celebrating the 400th anniversary of Quebec. As a special feature it also marks the first podcasts that we have noted in the magazine and suggested visiting our Website.

If you visit thebeaver.ca you can listen to two interviews. Marianna O'Gallagher is the author of Children of the Famine and Denys Delâge is the author of Allies Malgre Eux, both articles in the special edition. The magazine is also being published in both French and English.

Check out the previous post for all the info on creating podcasts.

Podcasting for the Beaver

This week the Beaver launches it's first podcast interview. The interview was conducted with Joyce Glasner about her story on the Halifax Explosion.

We started with our trusty USB microphone that we had purchased previously (about $40). To conduct the interview we downloaded Skype, an online phone that works through your Internet connection. Phoning from one computer to the another with Skype is actually free, and you can order minutes to phone out to regular land lines. We ordered $15 worth of minutes which works out to several hours of phoning time.

Once we downloaded Skype, we downloaded Hot Recorder (for those of us on PCs) and Call Recorder (for the Mac users in our editorial department). Both programs run about $15 to download and will record the calls as they come in. Now that you have a record, you just need to edit it using Audacity, your free audio editing software mentioned here before.

Instant podcasting that within one morning had us downloaded, set up, and ready to go. Special thanks to several websites that help us find the programs we needed as well like Hot Recorder and Call Recorder.

To post our podcast online we used Podbean, and online podcast host that will help you get started for free and if you really get going you can upgrade to professional accounts afterwards.





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And you can now hear the first ever Beaver podcast interview conducted by Kristen Fry with Joyce Glasner. Keep an eye out for more podcasts as these interviews become a regular feature with The Beaver magazine.

*** Special thanks to Joyce Glasner who is an incredibly passionate historian and whose moving stories made our first Podcast extremely easy.