What is your Media Diet?

The Atlantic Wire is the latest (and greatest?) news aggregator to hit this web. Following in the tradition of the Daily Beast, The Browser, and the Huffington Post; the Atlantic Wire provides one stop shopping for opinion writing across the web. The site provides the usual breaking news, as well as clips of the latest in opinion writing with links to the complete pieces. Like the other sites it has developed a few of it’s own features to compliment the simple aggregating of other peoples work, one has caught my eye: The Media Diet.

The Media Diet is designed as an interview with a leading opinion leader. The interview is set-up as: How do people deal with the torrent of information that rains down on us all? What’s the secret to staying on top of the news without surrendering to the chaos of it? In this series, we ask people who seem well-informed to describe their media diets.

The feature like the site itself is still new, but some highlights of those who have shared their media diets include: Peter Beinhart, Clay Shirky, and David Brooks. You can see a complete list of those who have been interviews on the site. The responses range from: Twitter right when I wake up in the morning; I don’t read anything online at home; and all I do is read all day so at night I just try to watch bad sitcoms. The interviews provide a great glimpse into who some great minds choose to read and how they process information.

Reading through the posts on the Media Diet, led me to think about my own media diet (I will save that post for another day!). I also thought what is the media diet of our students? I think we can use this intuitive  feature as an inspiration to engage students in a conversation on where and how they get their information.  So here are few suggestions:

A Media Diet Log Book –Ask students to keep a “media log” for one week. This can be a piece of paper where students record the time, place, title, and type of media they consume (think nutrition or food log). After a week students can chart the results as individuals, work in teams/groups, or as a whole class.  The information can start a conversation on what type of media students consumer, where they get it, and when they use it.

What can you tell about a person from their media diet? — You can print out interviews from the Media Diet and assign students one person to research, looking at what is in this persons media diet and make inferences about what this person does for a living and where they might land on the political spectrum (liberal to conservative).

The Balanced Media Diet — Ask students to think back to elementary school when they were taught about the Food Pyramid, where the number of suggest daily food servings of each type of represented visually. Students can created a Media Diet Pyramid, showing which how many “servings” of each media type should be consumed daily to have a balance and healthy “diet.”  The folks over at Wired.com have already done this, you can use this as demo for your students.

Finally, you can use the prompt from the site uses as a great writing prompt for students. Describe your media diet.

Only a 5,103 Sumerian Nipur Cubit Commute to the Office

Yesterday, I was poking around on Google Maps and noticed the Labs tab on the top right corner, so I clicked.  What I found was a treasure trove for the social studies classroom.  The first item on the list “Distance Measurement Tool” is probably my favorite.

First and foremost the tool lets you measure from one point to the next. This is very useful in helping your students understand scale and distance visually:

• How far is it from our school to your house? How big is our state? Country? The Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Pennsylvania?
• Example Assignment:
  • What was the geographic significance of Philadelphia in the 13 original states? Measure the distance of Philadelphia to New York, Savannah, Boston, and Williamsburg; compared to the distance between New York and the cities listed.

So that is fun and straight forward, but come on let’s dial it up a bit. If you take a closer look at the distance measurement tool you will notice that you can measure in “Metric or English” units or click on “I’m feeling geeky” and let the social studies fun begin. Google will give you distance between two points in over 20 units of measurement (current and historical). Some of my favorites–the variety of ancient cubit measurements (Sumerian Nipur, Roman, Greek, Jewish 1st Temple, Jewish 2nd Temple, Jewish 2nd Temple Sacred, and the list goes on). The list also include the California Vara, the unit of measurement that the Spanish missionaries used to measure the distance between missionaries in the New World.  This is a really fun tool, which can help students understand that the idea of precise measurements has been around since the beginning of civilization.  Remember, this is also a great way to help student decode primary source documents, giving student the true sense of distance authors reference. There are plenty of calculators and conversation tables out there to tell you that 1 Sumerian Nipur Cubit = 20.4 inches but what does that mean to a high school student?

A Pre-School Election?

Working with my theme, started with the last post,  of the pre-school set I was reminded of this funny YouTube video.  I have used this in the classroom teach about campaign advertising. The video (above) is a classic election “attack ad” for a pre-school class presidential race. Before you go forwarding this around to your friends, wait a second and think about it. What a great way to teach campaign ad analysis in the classroom.

What you have here is a typical ad that includes a number of  statements that can be “fact-checked” and analyzed from both sides: Why did Jimmy Jones’ campaign choose to highlight them and not others? Students can be asked to also analyze the visuals and audio of the ad.

Assignment ideas:

Fact check the ad and write an analysis.

Create a response ad from Billy’s point of view

Students can watch real ads from previous presidential campaigns (www.livingroomcandidate.org) and look for similar characteristics in the Billy ad

Don’t forget once you get back to school in the fall we will be heading into a national election in November. This could be a fun way to kick it off!

Sid the Inquiry Kid

On weekend mornings when we wake up, Miles and I sit and watch some TV and eat our breakfast. Besides the big name shows: Sesame Street, Yo Gabba Gabba, and Thomas the Tank Engine, Miles has become a big fan of Sid the Science Kid. The daily program on PBS (locally on WHYY) is a 30 minute CGI’d animation program for the pre-school set. Centered on Sid, an aspiring pre-school scientist. Each program follows the same storyline: Sid has question and over the course of the show he learns the answer, culminating with him stating the answer at the end of each “day.”

Since we are a one TV home, I have watched a number of Sid episodes. Something always strikes me, that I thought I would share. Each episode is a perfect example of inquiry learning! Sid starts his day getting ready for school and presenting a question to the “audience”. His question is fine tuned over breakfast with his parents, and his investigation begins when get gets to school. Sid interviews each of this three friends (after a singing introduction of each character) which gives us a sense of prior knowledge each kid brings. Then Sid and his peers are welcomed into the classroom where, his teacher (Susie) focuses the question and begins the lesson, providing necessary background information. With the new information in hand, the students move to test the idea and create new knowledge (in the Super Fab Lab!). Sid and Co. are then directed to take their new knowledge and play with their ideas. The end of school provides the teacher the chance to go even deeper by providing detailed information in the form of a song. The show ends with Sid back at home sharing his answers and new knowledge with this parents. Finally, just before the credits Sid is in his PJs at the end of the day reflecting on the learning that has happened over the day.

Why does a show that focuses on inquiry learning always have to be about science?

Little Sid may grow up and fall in love with the social Sciences or even the humanities, but do not worry about little Sid he can use his pre-school inquiry skills in all of these academic areas. Then why do we always choose to present inquiry as only the domain of science?

What would a non-science Sid show look like? Well current episodes deal with: simple machines, human senses, healthy eating. I would like to propose some new topics: why do we vote, free speech, what is money, making rules, what is art, good vs. bad.

Moving the Books: The Ornament of the World

We are preparing for Lesser Boy 2.0 and I am losing my home office with the very tall and beautiful built in bookcases. But, I think it is worth it and frankly I am excited to see those shelves filled with toys and kids books! The loss of the office and it’s shelves has required me to move all the books upstairs into the new shared office. Despite the warm weather and flight of stairs this process has been pure joy. The chance to take down books and spend some time with them, it really is better than any Facebook update. The chance to catch up with old friends leads me to this post, the first in what I hope will be many short book reviews.

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal

I purchased this book soon after its publication. I remember that I had just read a couple of works of historical fiction about Jews in Iberia and was very interested in the period. Plus it fed into what was then my growing interest into the question of why Jews and Muslims cannot get along (no time for this here, maybe more in another post if I am feeling daring!). The book is a work of high quality popular history, which does not shy away from depth and focus.

I had heard medieval Granada was a truly unique place,  in passing,  in various history texts and have always made a point of mentioning it to students while studying the middle ages, specifically Spain. I never had the details to dig deep and provide interesting examples. The book is full of vignettes and stories about the three religious groups that can provide secondary teachers with just the right hooks for students, or sections can be reproduced for student reading on a specific period.

After I pulled if off the shelf, I Googled the title to look for some quick reviews, links, and the image you see above and I was surprised that the scholarly reviews were all quite positive but the popular reviews (a la Amazon.com) were not. One that jumped out at me called the work “Optimistic History”. This really concerned me, I see the work as focusing on a moment in history that is often neglected and should be held up as a model of what greatness can be when everyone puts down that labels and lives in peace. Then again maybe as a teacher, I am a big optimist.

To wrap up, I would recommend this as a great supplemental read for teachers who teach courses in World History, Religion, if you are teaching AP then WORLD and EUROPEAN HISTORY.

Bonus, Dr. Menocal did her PhD at Penn, I think Albert would really dig this book.

Why I am Obsessed with the UK Elections

I am sitting here watching BBC live news coverage of the UK Election returns, via C-SPAN. What will the results be: hung Parliament, minority governance, a coalition government, or another election in 4 weeks? These terms are absolutely fascinating and have driven me across the web in the past few days to understand them, and I have to say as much time as I have spent on Wikipedia and as much of an Anglo-phile that I am, I still am an amateur when it comes to British politics.

So the results are coming in, we see candidates all sharing the stage together in constituencies across the UK while results are read aloud and winners shake the hands with losers, and give a short statement. Britons are staying up into the early morning hours while votes are counted. When the sun rises conversations will have to begin amongst the elected leaders, to create a new government and by the time we wake up here on the East Coast of the United States, someone will head over and ask the Queen’s permission to form a new government.

Excited yet? Where do you turn to get up to speed, here are a few suggestions:

• BBC Election 2010
• The Guardian Newspaper

What is fascinating about this is the fact that the British do not have a formal constitution This means that if there is a dispute in the election, i.e. there is no clear winner, it is up to the parties to sort it out in negotiation or for another election to be held. Here in the States, as seen in the 2000 election, we head to the courts and the interpretation of the law. This is a stark contrast and one that I think would be fascinating to present to students.

Assignment Ideas:

• Ask students to research the largest parties in the UK and create posters with the platforms of each
• Compare and contrast the UK and US systems
• Tune into the Queen’s speech on May 25th during school.

Google Books Uncovers the Motel of Mysteries

This past weekend I presented a short demo lesson, well really a talk, about how I have taught archaeology in the middle school classroom.  The lesson begins with  a reading of David Macauley’s The Motel of Mysteries a really wonderful and all but forgotten book. You can find a synopsis of the here .

Needless to say although it is a wonderful story and very smartly written the illustrations are the focus and the key to a lesson how to study the past through artifacts (i.e. archaeology). Way back in the 1990s when I first started teaching with this book in my 7th grade classroom at the North Cross School, I searched for a way to get the images big enough for everyone to see them in detail. The solution was easy enough, overhead projector. I photocopied the entire book onto acetate, kind of magic lantern like!  This could keep working, but the book also seems to go out of print now and again. Enter Google Books.

Google Books has a copy complete scanned, but you cannot access the whole thing. You can access a good portion of it, enough to make the point to your students, plus if you already have a digital projector you can just pop it right up. Now for the fun part, working around the limitations of Google Books, i.e. copyright protection. (Please note: What I am advocating for is Education Fair Use, I am sure Mr. Macauley would be ok with this)

This post is not meant to focus on literary piracy, but to talk about using this great book in the classroom. The Motel of Mysteries satirizes the craze for all things Egyptian that took place in the late 70s, started by the first tour of King Tut artifacts to visit the States. The book asks the question, what if we have completely misinterpreted the artifacts found in King Tut’s Tomb?

The book challenges students, in a humorous way, to ask questions of the past. A teacher led discussion following the reading, demonstrates that artifacts have to be corroborated with the historical record. Although this does take some of  the romance out of archaeology it teaches the lesson.

The assessment for the activity was:

• Imagine an archaeologist discovers your bedroom 1,000 years in the future, exactly as it were today. What would an analysis look like? What historical record could the archaeologist used to support the findings?

A Common-Place in Early America

Common-Place is an online Early American history journal. Now don’t call it on ‘zine, this is not 2001 folks. The journal, sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the University of Oklahoma, is written predominantly by professional historians and scholars but note that a number of author are secondary social studies teachers. This is one of those sites that you find as a US History teacher and think, wow this is exactly what I am looking for to use with my students. The quality of the writing is on a high level, but very accessible to a high school classroom. What you find are articles and ideas about history that are not found in the text.  The design and voice of the site are perfectly suited for the secondary classroom, and I think if you have students who are passionate about history and looking for more information this site is a great place to send them.

I originally found the site while developing lessons for the Franklin Tercentenary Project, for a lesson on Franklin’s autobiography.  The lesson I developed (since edited and changed)  used an article titled “Walking Moraley’s Streets: Philadelphia” this fascinating piece by Billy Smith, of the University of Montana, examines the real life of Walter Moraley an indentured servant who landed in Philadelphia approximately the same time as Franklin. Unlike, Franlkin’s story of his first hours in the city we have a true written record from Morley of life in the city. I use the article and sections of the autobiography to have students compare and contrast, and start a critical analysis of Franklin and the life story he published to the world. I have since use the Smith article time and again as a reading assignment before lectures on the history of Philadelphia, but most often as a reading before I give a walking tour of 18th century Philadelphia.