Technology in PD: Plan, Don't Ban

I just finished participating in a two day workshop on mentoring teachers in differentiated instruction put on by a professional development team in a very large Florida school district. The workshop was kicked off by having the collaborative norms read to us as has become the standard practice while attending such things. The facilitator paid particular attention the "responsible use of technology" and made it clear that they would prefer we not use the iPads and smart phones sitting in front of just about everybody.

As the workshop went on, the facilitators called everybody's attention to the last "norm" on their poster several times as people used iPads to snap pictures of the posters we created or sneak a look at their emails. My colleagues and I found this to be a bit demeaning.

The presenters could have planned to integrate technology to make their workshop more interactive. Resources to backchannel, collaborate, and network have been in common use at conferences for years now. The content of the workshop itself was mostly good but the presentation became a bit tedious and it reminded me of the schoolmarm types who are still complaining about kids having phones in their classes.

If you are still fighting it, you haven't figured out how to use it.

Five Interactive Civil War Resources

I won't be able to make it to Gettysburg this summer as the Civil War sesquicentennial festivities reach a fever pitch but I am grateful for the amazing resources that have been produced in the past couple of years. The Civil War is one of those topics that I could spend a whole year teaching and I am always left feeling guilty for not doing it justice crammed into the last few weeks of the school year. My students are currently wrapping up projects that they designed covering a wide variety of topics from the role of animals in the war, the psychology of Civil War reenactors, to the impact of diarrhea (no laughing matter-it killed 34,000 during the war) so I thought I would share five of my favorite interactive resources for learning about the Civil War:

Civil War 150
Resources like this serve as a partial redemption for the Bigfoot, Ancient Aliens, and pawn store garbage put out by the History Channel. This is a visually stunning and interesting infographic that covers a wide range of topics and provides a great place to start exploring the many aspects of the war that you may not have thought about.

Battles and Casualties of the Civil War Map
A stunning map from the Washington Post's Civil War 150 coverage. This is a great conversation starter about the trends over time and geographically that can be seen when the data is put in visual form.

New York Times Disunion Multimedia
A series of timelines, maps, and slideshows about several topics. The NYT's Disunion coverage is very comprehensive but I have found that it is not as student friendly as the coverage done by the Washington Post.

Civil War Animated
This is part of the History Animated series that breaks down battles from several wars and provides an interesting way of learning about strategy and tactics. The Civil War section covers twenty-one battles divided into two theaters of conflict and also has a section about leaders.

Comparing the North and South
This series of animated maps from teachinghistory.org illustrates many of the resources that both sides had going into the war. This year I used it to have students analyze the factors and make a prediction about who had the advantage going into the war. The Union very clearly had an advantage in many areas and they were surprised by the course that the war took in the first few battles. The same organization also created Meet the Commanders.

Thinglink: Make Images Interactive

My favorite new tool of the past six months is thinglink, a free and easy to use web tool that allows you to add interactive elements to pictures. You can add links to videos, websites, and Google Docs to provide resources in an interesting way. Pictures from the web or your computer can be used but the possibilities really become endless with some basic Photoshop skills.

Here is one for a historical inquiry lesson on John Brown:


An example of a webquest: