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.