Free Online Professional Development

Looking to earn an OPI Renewal Unit and learn a thing or two about resources for teaching Montana history or Teaching with Primary Sources?

Check out our Online Professional Development page.

I spent Christmas vacation updating the first offering: an online tour of the Montana Historical Society's Educator Resources and Montana: Stories of the Land Companion Website. I created this online professional development training (worth one OPI renewal unit) several years ago and it had become wildly out of date. If you are new to teaching Montana history--or even if you've been at it awhile but haven't spent time exploring our website, this training is for you.

This page also features six trainings created by the Library of Congress:

• Introduction to the Library of Congress
• Supporting Inquiry with Primary Sources
• Copyright and Primary Sources
• Analyzing Primary Sources: Photographs and Prints
• Analyzing Primary Sources: Maps
• Finding Primary Sources

We liked them so much, decided to encourage their use by Montana teachers by providing links and adding a quiz to each so that we could provide OPI Renewal units.

Are there other online trainings you'd recommend to your colleagues? Let me know and I'll pass the word along.

Lesson plans relating to the Montana legislature

Roberts social studies Clark Beggar just wrote me asking, "Do you know of lesson plan/unit or anything that someone has put together related to the Montana Legislature. Perhaps a history unit, or maybe a government/civics/current events type unit?"

The short answer is "no"--but I know who t ask: YOU!

Please help me and Clark and other colleagues looking for good lesson plans on the legislature by sending your recommendations to mkohl@mt.gov.

P.S. I did dig a very little and found this list of Civic Education Resources on the Montana legislature's website. I haven't spent time looking at any of these resources, but it seemed a promising place to start. Have you used any of them? And, if so, what do you think?

Popular Past Posts

Happy New Year! The coming of the new year is a time for reflection, so I decided to take a moment and look back. Below are the most popular posts to this blog.

5. In fifth place, with 277 views, is Teaching Montana History in Fourth Grade. This post suggests ways to piece together a fourth grade curriculum using existing lesson plans.

4. In fourth place, with 326 views, is Lesson Plans on Mining and Primary Sources. This post featured lesson plans created by teachers who attended 2011 Richest Hills: Mining and the Far West, a Landmarks of American History and Culture workshop, funded by NEH. We've taken the link to most of those lessons down--but you can find the creme de la creme here. And consider applying to this summer's Richest Hills workshop--it is back, bigger and better than ever. 

3. In third place, with 454 views, is Teaching Women's History Matters. Since this post mostly provides information about a workshop we gave last year, I'm going to cheat and provide instead a link to the original post on the Women's History Matters project. This one contains useful links and information and actually came in at number 7 on the top ten list.

2. In second place, with 487 views, is Top Ten Most Important Events in Montana History. This provides links to a survey--which you (and your students) can still take--although I'm no longer tabulating results. It also includes links to the survey results. I found both taking the survey and analyzing the results thought provoking.

1. In first place, with a whopping 2,778 views, is National History Day Theme for 2015. My guess is that this number is inflated by the thousands of students googling "National History Day Theme 2015"--but that only goes to show how very popular NHD is across the country. Want more information on participating in National History Day? Start here--or contact the Montana coordinator, Gallatin Gateway middle school teacher Michael Herdina.

More Facebook Finds: Influential Americans, the Montana Authors Project, and Indigenous Music Videos

Remember a few weeks ago, when I talked about Facebook as a source for inspiration and work-related material?

Here are a few things that have popped up on my feed lately:

National History Day Project Ideas 

The Atlantic sponsored a link to this article on the 100 most influential figures in American history. This would be great for students looking for topics to compete in this year's National History Day, the theme of which is "Leadership and Legacy in History." (For more on National History Day in Montana see this post about it, visit the Montana Historical Society’s NHD page or visit the Montana State NHD page.)

Montana Authors Project Map

Humanities Montana is asking for input on which author it should add next to its fabulous Montana Authors Project Map.  Right now the map features Mary Clearman Blew, A. B. Guthrie, Judy Blunt, James Welch, Debra Magpie Earling, Norman Maclean, Richard Hugo, D'Arcy McNickle, Ivan Doig, and Andrew Garcia. If you teach Montana literature (or just like it) and haven't played around with this map, stop reading and go there now! If you have an author you'd like to see added to the map, send Humanities Montana an email or contact them on their Facebook page.

Indian Education for All

This link to an article about the Real Life Indian photo project came from the National Museum of the American Indian's Facebook page: " 'Real Life Indian' Photo Project Geared to Defeat All Those Stereotypes". It looks as if the project accepts outside submissions including student work!

 

And finally, for a more enjoyable winter break, I give you for your listening pleasure the Best Indigenous Music Videos of 2014. My own personal favorites are (at number 4) A Tribe Called Red: "Sisters" and (at number 3) Supaman: "Prayer Loop Song." (Added bonus: Supaman is from from the Crow Reservation.) I think these music videos are a powerful way to remind students that Indians do NOT live only in museums, that tribal cultures are alive, and that, like all cultures, they adapt and change over time.

Need more of a rationale to bring some of this music back to your classroom (as is age/school appropriate)? How about Essential Understanding #2: "There is great diversity among individual American Indians as identity is developed, defined and redefined by entities, organizations and people. A continuum of Indian identity, unique to each individual, ranges from assimilated to traditional. There is no generic American Indian."

Best wishes for a merry Christmas--and a joyous new year.

Common Core and Images

I have long believed that we should teach students to apply close reading strategies to primary sources, including visual sources like photographs and that, conversely, having students work with visual sources gives them an important (and accessible) opportunity to practice close reading.

TPS-Barat (whose work I mentioned in this recent post) created this useful comparison between Common Core Reading Anchor Standards and Image Analysis Skills that I pull out every time I need to persuade someone that having students analyzing images is real, worthwhile work. 

So it was great to see the video Applying Common Core Habits to Arts Lessons on the Teaching Channel recently. It focused on teaching students to use close reading habits and asking/answering text dependent questions when they look at art. 

Looking for other tools that use images to help students practice close reading (and make evidence-based claims)? I'm completely enamored with Visual Thinking Strategies, a technique discussed in more detail here. 

Chronicling America Rocks. Oh--and Happy Chanukah

Hanukkah starts tonight, so just for giggles, I decided to search "Hanukkah" and "Chanukah" in the Montana newspapers digitized as part of the Library of Congress/National Endowment for the Humanities Chronicling America project.

I found two articles from the Anaconda Standard, both about programs (one in 1897 and one in 1898) put on children by attending the Butte Bnai Israel congregation's religious education program .

Montana is one of the 39 states participating in Chronicling America. Right now, issues from 38 Montana newspapers are online and searchable by key word. Newly available are

• Bozeman Weekly Chronicle, 1887-1888
• Great Falls Daily Tribune, 1919-1922
• Neihart Herald, 1891-1901
• River Press (Fort Benton), 1905-1914 

There will be even more titles available by the end of 2015, including the Dupuyer Acantha (1894–1899), Ekalaka Eagle (1910–1915), (Hamilton) Western News (1900–1910), Whitefish Pilot (1908–1912) and the Wibaux Pioneer (1907–1914).

Want to know more about Chronicling America and ways to use it in the classroom? This post from last March is a good starting point: Searching Chronicling America

EdSITEment, the National Endowment for the Humanities site for educators, also has great resources for using Chronicling America, including tutorials and lesson plans.

For more on Hanukkah, see last year's post, my Favorite Montana Hanukkah Story--and Resources to Teach It.

On Buffalo Jumps and Depression Era Photos: Cool Stuff I've Seen Lately

No theme this time--just info about some cool resources I've seen recently.

Buffalo Hunters

I was fascinated by this article, "The Buffalo Chasers: Vast expanses of grassland near the Rocky Mountains bear evidence of an extraordinary ancient buffalo hunting culture" published in Archaeology, about research being conducted on the Blackfeet Reservation. (For those of you who use the textbook, the article complements Chapter 2: People of the Dog Days).

According to the article, many scholars historically believed that the Blackfeet only constituted themselves into well-organized tribes after the arrival of horses and guns. This new research on buffalo jumps pushes the development of a complex political society back to 900 A.D. and better reflects the tribes' understanding of its own cultural development. “We have 11 separate, elaborate drive-line systems in just a 20-mile stretch of Two Medicine River. That took coordination and a level of planning for the future that haven’t normally been associated with nomadic people in this part of the world,” archaeologist Maria Nieves Zedeño explains. The article continues:

The Old Women’s Phase people did not leave behind elaborate burials or evidence of long-term storage facilities, signs that archaeologists have typically used to measure the social complexity of prehistoric societies. Scholars therefore believed that these buffalo-hunting people were essentially simple foragers, without any of the complex political arrangements that organized farmers to the east or the fishing cultures of the Northwest Coast had. “Bison hunters have been dismissed as being not as sophisticated as other cultures,” says Royal Alberta Museum archaeologist Jack Brink, who excavated at Canada’s Heads-Smashed-In, a noted buffalo jump. “There was this idea that they were opportunistic hunters skulking across the northern plains. But what we’re finding is that their way of life was complex and thought out in ways that reflected powerful social controls. http://www.archaeology.org/issues/155-1411/letter-from/2587-letter-from-montana-buffalo-jumps

Depression Era Photographs

Jumping ahead a millenia, a new resource from Yale and NEH, Photogrammar brings together 170,000 images by photographers employed by the Farm Securities Administration and Office of War Information from 1935 to 1945. The images (all owned by the Library of Congress) are searchable by keyword, and you can filter your search by state, county, city, date, and photographer.