This page contains a description of the student projects for J. B. Owens's summer 1998 graduate-level professional development course for secondary school teachers. The course is entitled Topics in World History, 1350-1800. Questions and comments may be sent to me at my e-mail address owenjack@isu.edu. Please be sure to include your name and e-mail address in the body of your message.
The Projects
There are four books
assigned for the course.
On some aspect of each book, you are to create a class module showing how you would teach
some central concept which strikes you as important and interesting. For these four modules,
you are to employ the format developed by Dr. Matthew Downey of the University of
Northern Colorado for his Secondary Social Studies Methods class. Via e-mail I will send
you both the module format and an example of its use. I am grateful to Dr. Downey for
permission to use this material.
Final Presentation
You may present
your completed
modules to me and your fellow students by any convenient means. If you include
connections ("hot links") to on-line resources, you may wish to present you modules in the
form of web pages. This is easy to do, and I can teach you how. Moreover, if you prepare
your modules in this form and like the results, I am certain that you can publish them for the
assistance of others on the World History
Teaching Network.
Standards
As you will see in the class
module format, you
will need to relate your work to the relevant sections of the National Standards for World
History which are available from the National
Center for History in the Schools. You will receive more information about these
standards as part of the course.
Great Teams
Although you will want to
develop the class
modules which seem appropriate to you, you are encouraged to COLLABORATE with each
other on these projects. The COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATIONS
TECHNIQUES we will use in this course lend themselves to such collaboration. History and
Social Studies teachers and other History professionals in Idaho are much too isolated from
one another, and this isolation hurts our ability to reach our goals and undermines the
enjoyment we should get from doing something we love. Most significant creative,
innovative work now is done by GREAT GROUPS or TEAMS rather than by people working
individually. Among other things, you should learn in this course how you can utilize
computer-mediated means of communication to reduce your professional isolation and build a
basis for effective disciplinary collaboration.
Major efforts are being made to help facilitate your collaboration, and I am continually trying to organize some of this material for your use on my web resources pages. There are also some major historical resources sites of which you should be aware.
Moreover, as you can see from the outline of my recent plenary address to a regional graduate students conference, I think that collaborative learning is one area in which computer-mediated teaching and learning offers great promise. Depending on your school's computer resources, you may wish to incorporate such activities into your own teaching.
Citation Style
If you need to cite sources
in your class modules,
you should consult for guidance the pages on bibliography and citation
style and on plagiarism.
Revisions
The computer is a major tool for
dialogue. I can
insert my responses to what you have written within your electronic text; you can respond to
these by revising what you have done; I can examine together on my screen both your
original text (with my responses) and your revised text, and I can insert further queries and
comments.
If it is submitted sufficiently before the 23 July due date in electronic form, I will be happy to raise queries in the text of your draft modules. You may then rewrite your project to respond to these queries (as well as dealing with flaws of style and content), improving the quality of what you have written. You should clarify with me the meaning of my queries before you begin your revisions. There will be no limit to the number of times you can rewrite your modules. To solicit my comments, you will need to submit your draft module as an ASCII ("plain text"; "DOS text") e-mail message or post it as a web page.
Web Resources
Many individuals and groups
are working hard
to make more easily available the rapidly growing body of on-line resources available for
teaching and learning. Among these are:
All contents copyright © 1998. J. B. Owens All rights reserved.Revised: 18 May 1998
URL: http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/cmdl/project.html