Vintage Travel Films and Posters

On Monday, Brain Pickings had an article featuring this collection of vintage travel posters available through the Boston Public Library's Flickr collection. The posters advertise travel opportunities all over the world in the 20th Century. The collection reminded me of The Travel Film Archive.

The Travel Film Archive is a collection of hundreds of travel films recorded between 1900 and 1970. The films were originally recorded to promote various places around the world as tourist destinations. In the archives you will find films about US National Parks, cities across the globe, and cultural events from around the world. The videos are available on The Travel Film Archive website and on YouTube.

Applications for Education
The posters and videos could be good to use in a Glogster project about places that your students study in their history and geography lessons. You could also use the posters in Thinglink to have students create interactive historical travel posters.

How War Stories Inspire Learning

How War Stories Inspire Children to Learn is an interesting audio slideshow from the BBC. The presentation features Dr. Geoff Fox talking about three books and their influence on the way that children think about and learn about war. The three books Dr. Fox discusses are The Machine Gunners, War Horse, and Carrie's War. The slideshow includes archival images of WWI and WWII in England.

Applications for Education
How War Stories Inspire Children to Learn introduced me to a couple of books that I'm going to add to my reading list. Perhaps the slideshow will do the same for you and you'll want to add these books to your classroom.

Interpreting Political Cartoons - Guest Post

The inspiration for this lesson came from an article by John Bickford discussing how political cartoons can and should be used in the classroom. The article is copyrighted but I have recieved permission from Social Studies Research and Practice to share the article with freetech4teachers. If you would like to view more articles from their online peer reviewed journal click here.

In an effort to encourage class discussion I had my students watch pre-selected video clips of the GOP debates. This assignment can be done just as well by using primary source documents.

Then they create their own political cartoons on Toondoo (others will work but I like toondoo the best). Using a computer program or website works better than allowing the students to free hand the assignment. The point of the assignment is to draw meaning and historical significance from the videos or documents not draw lines an characters.

Depending on your students ability this assignment will take a week or even two to complete.  The cartoons should be well thought out and well presented. Then when the students are finished they will present.

In every piece of art two messages exist. An intended message and a conveyed or received message. This idea is at work in this lesson. 


The students who created cartoons will present the cartoons to the class but will not be able to share their intended message until prompted by the teacher.

Meanwhile the remainder of the class is discussing the conveyed message. It becomes particularly interesting to see how the two perspectives make up the whole message.

Student engagement is always essential to an effective lesson. I have rarely achieved the same level of student engagement in class discussion. I believe it has something to do with the fact that they created the content in which we are discussing.


My big points that I attempt to get across to my class throughout this process are as follows:

• Why a political cartoon is different from a comic strip
• How to find the message of a cartoon (imagery, symbolism, sarcasm etc.)
• Perspective

Perspective is the big one. I want my students to try to figure out the creators perspective and what they are trying to accomplish by the cartoon. If they can successfully learn this it will help them understand professional cartoonist.

If you are feeling like a super overachiever you may see if you can contact a political cartoonist from a local newspaper to come in as a follow up activity a week or two after the lesson.


About the Guest Blogger
My name is Marcus Byrd and I write at TeacherAde. I have only been blogging for about 4 months but have really enjoyed the experience of learning from and connecting to other educators. I am studying at the University of West Georgia while I work in the Paulding County School District. I am always interested in building a larger network of teachers and collaborators.

My teaching career began as a paraprofessional or teachers aid. After two years of working alongside the teacher I realized how much that teachers are responsible for. My attitude from early on became that I like to help teachers teach. So I began the blog to do that on a larger scale and have been thrilled about where it has taken me in 4 months. I am even more excited about where it will take me in the future. If you know something that will help teachers teach then by all means share it!

The Arts and History - Part 2

Cover scan of ''The Americans''
1969 2nd printing
from Wikipedia

Robert Frank is one of my favorite photographers - I discovered The Americans in a History of Photography class as an undergrad, and it has resonated with me ever since. Back in the Fall semester of 2009 I was able to take a group of students to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the collected photographs of The Americans on display. Here is a story NPR produced about that show, and here is another. This one is from The New Yorker. You get the idea.

When this show was on display, the creators of Selected Shorts aired a program comprised of short stories written by authors who were inspired by a particular photograph from the Frank show. You can download the podcast of the stories being read and have students listen to the readings as part of an examination of the photographs. They could choose their own photograph to be the inspiration for their own creative writing or research or select work from a different photographer or genre all together to inspire their writing. Lots of possibilities!

In a history or American Studies class, these (or any) photographs can be used to identify important moments in US history and the array of perspectives from which the event can be understood. My students used photographs as the starting point for researching and writing historical fiction; working in groups, they shared the historical event which was the focus of their stories, but each author developed a narrator with a unique perspective on that particular event in history.


Here is the outline of the exercise that I presented to the students. Once they selected their groups, identified their event and their narrator perspectives, they had to research to find the authentic answers to these questions about their fictional narrator’s experiences. The students were required to submit an annotated bibliography before submitting their responses to their questions so I could check the sources they were using for depth and accuracy. For citations I usually recommend they use a resource like BibMe, but they prefer EasyBib. When they were ready to began crafting their short story, I provided them this rubric (according to which their final story collections were assessed) and links to several online writing assistants and resources like writing advice from Barry Lane, literacy education online, and the Roane State OWL.
By writing historical fiction students develop research skills, critical reading and writing skills, become intimately familiar with a period of time in history and engage in authentic inquiry. 


About the Guest Blogger, Jacquelyn Whiting:
This is my fourth year as a member of the humanities department at Joel Barlow High School in rural Redding, CT. I have been teaching social studies since 1993 during which time I have taught all different levels of US History including AP, as well as American Government, Art History, Women in American History, Psychology, Environmental Studies and integrated US History and English. My work with my classes is archived on my website: http://jackiewhiting.net as is my contact information. I also write a blog about incorporating digital resources into the study of the humanities, http://www.thedigitalhumanities.com/. I am currently the chair of the professional development committee for my school and offer workshops each year focused on exploring and integrating into the curriculum web resources that enhance our teaching and our students learning. Outlines of and resources for these workshops are also available on my website.

Create Videos and Posters on the U.S. National Archives Digital Experience

This afternoon as part of a Primary Resources 2.0 workshop that I conducted (workshop outline here), we explored some resources on the National Archives Experience Digital Vaults. The Digital Vaults offers three good tools that students and teachers can use to create content using images and documents from the National Archives.

The National Archives Digital Vault poster and video creation tools allow students to drag and drop digital artifacts into a poster or video. The National Archives provides images, documents, and audio in an easy to use editor. When making a poster students can combine multiple images, change background colors, and create captions to make collages of digital artifacts. See the screen capture below for a demonstration of poster editing.

Creating a video is just as easy as creating a poster in the Digital Vaults. To create a video simply drag your selected images on to the editing templates, type image captions, select the duration of display for each image, and select audio tracks. See the screen capture below for a look at the video editor.

Applications for Education
The Pathways tool in the Digital Vaults can be used to create small quizzes that ask students to identify the connections between two or more images or documents. To start, drag one image to you Pathways menu then select a related item to add to your Pathway. Type in a clue for students to use to help them make the connection. When you share your Pathway with others, they will see only your first image and your connection clue, they have to find the image that connects. Take a look at a sample Pathways challenge here.

A Short Biography of Thomas Edison and Some Lesson Plans

In a case of YouTube's "related videos" suggestions actually being useful, after watching this video about the history of calendars, I discovered this short video biography of Thomas Edison. Even though the end of the video does reveal the producer's bias, the video does a nice job of explaining Edison's contributions to the conveniences of modern life.




Applications for Education
The video could be a good match for these Edison lessons offered through EDSITEment. EDSITEment offers four lesson activities that are designed to be used together, but with some slight modifications they could be used individually. The purpose of the EDSITEment lessons is to get students to investigate and analyze how Edison's inventions influenced life in the early 20th Century and how those inventions have influenced life today.

On a related note, if you're ever in the Fort Myers, Florida area, I highly recommend visiting the Edison & Ford Winter Estates.

Building a Gold Mine

Last week I shared a list of lesson plans for teaching about historical gold rushes in North America. Yesterday, the National Archives' featured document was this image of men developing a gold mine in the Sierra Nevada. That image gave me the idea for a VoiceThread project about gold rushes. You could start with this image (pictured below) and ask students to share their thoughts about the construction techniques and the men in the picture. Then have students search sources like The Commons, US National Archives, or simply Google Images to find more images to add to and comment on in theVoiceThread that they start.

Image source: Today's Document from the National Archives