Fun Friday Resources
/An oddball week here, just some random websites that may or may not be of interest to you.
First up: need a manual for that food processor/lawn mower/foldaway bed? Check out ManualAgent.com for a complete lineup.
Ready to get started on that historical novel set in your hometown but don’t have enough info? Atlas Obscura has a nice article with suggestions, resources, and links to do local historical research. If nothing else, it might be a worthy schooling-from-home assignment!
We had mugs and everything.
Let me go off on a tangent and put on my educator hat. Decades ago I spearheaded a “Curriculum Liberation Front” at my school. (I was the media specialist.) It was a study group of teachers who were interested in learning more about brain-based learning, active learning, etc., and we made a great deal of headway in altering the ways we presented information to students.
[sidenote to the tangent: I just discovered that all this was so long ago that none of my KeyNote presentations can even be opened. However, you can read some of my ramblings here.]
The main idea is that this kind of local historical research can be structured as an extended project that incorporates multiple learning objectives in multiple discipline areas. Do you need your learner to be able to:
evaluate resources for validity and applicability
select information to illustrate a point
write persuasively or informatively about a topic
develop an understanding of historical events in context
etc.
Our motto.
Then an active learning project is perfect for your needs.
The trick is to frame it all with an Essential Question, something like, “The local historical society wants a new exhibit for the museum. What is an episode in our town’s history that you think would make a good exhibit?” Then the assignment becomes “Write a proposal for such an exhibit, giving your reasons and providing a design for the exhibit.”
You can imagine how this might trigger a lot more interest in a learner than reading a chapter in a book and regurgitating some facts on the test. The problem becomes testing, doesn’t it? You can excite those learners all you like, and you can produce stellar writers/planners/thinkers, but if the standardized test is not going to ask about any of it, then such an approach becomes a waste of time. (And such an approach is time-intensive.)
And so our teachers very rarely use this approach. As CLF’s other motto put it: “What’s unassessed is unaddressed.”
Here’s something silly, fun, and actually fascinating: 3-D globes from the British Library. Take them out for a spin!
update: I have discovered that all the old KeyNote files can be opened in OpenOffice. Whew! I am once again available for hire as an instructional design consultant for your school.
