Social Studies Teaching Strategies
January 25th, 2010
Most college students struggle with the vocabulary of our disciplines. In their various electronic exchanges, they do not use a lot of multisyllabic, difficult-to-pronounce words. And virtually all college courses are vocabulary rich – unfamiliar words abound. Most students know that the new vocabulary in a course is important. They use flash cards and other methods to help them memorize the words and their meanings for their exams. Two days later, the words and their meanings are gone
February 13th, 2009
PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking site from the St. Petersburg Times that brought you the Truth-o-Meter during the 2008 presidential election, has posted a new device for tracking President Obama’s 510 campaign promises: The Obameter.
January 9th, 2009
Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media have created Budget Hero, an engaging online game that challenges users to balance the federal budget (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2008/05/budget_hero/). The game relies on numbers and budget forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and offers users options for balancing the budget like cutting aid to foreign governments or increasing the retirement age to 67.
December 4th, 2008
Most of your students can tell you where they were on 9/11, just as a generation ago people could remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy died. Each generation has its pivotal moment; for the WWII generation, that event was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
National Geographic has captured Pearl Harbor’s events in a multi-media timeline and map that would work well as a history mini-unit, stretching over one or two class periods. http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ax/map.html The site’s interactive timeline pulls up maps of the Hawaiian Islands with ship and aircraft movements. Clicking on Full Story reveals a paragraph about each event on the timeline, photos from the moment, and sometimes first-person testimonials about the event.
November 3rd, 2008
November of 2006 was a “Blues Fest,” according to the Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa.
You might not remember, but that was the election when the democrats won back a majority of seats in the House of Representatives.
September 29th, 2008
Psephophobia is the fear of voting.
Maybe voters are afraid of the small booths, the machines, or the hanging chad. Perhaps young voters just don’t know what to expect.
Whatever their fear, a 2003 study from Representative Democracy in America: Voices of the People found that only 66 percent of 15- 26-year-olds thought voting was part of being a good citizen.
September 22nd, 2008
My new favorite site for in-depth politics is from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato. Sabato calls his site the Crystal Ball and bills itself as the Web’s most accurate political analysis. I’m not qualified to judge that, but I do think the site would be useful in a classroom.
September 15th, 2008
Voting America, a site from the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, has put together interactive and cinematic maps that illustrate how the states voted in each presidential election from 1840 – 2004.
Cinematic maps. The cinematic maps play like a movie and show how the states have changed in population and politics from the 19th through the 21st centuries. When you select a map series, you can pause, rewind, or fast forward the player. Clicking on the year opens up the Wikipedia entry for that year’s election in a new window.
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