Blog Duel

Learning Objectives:

1.      Describe a historical verbal or physical duel between two people in history.

2.      Describe the origins of the discontent of each others’ views and how the problems grew.

3.      Describe the outcome and historical significance of the duel itself.

4.      Evaluate blogs on the internet and those created by peers.

Formative and Summative Assignment

Outcome:  Students will compose a blog post describing the origins and outcome of a verbal or physical duel between two people in the past. Students will use and evaluate blogs on the internet and of their classmates.

Assignment Description:  Blogs have become an outlet for many aspiring writers to post informative articles on a variety of historical topics that we used to find in scholarly journals.  Reading and following blogs is a very common activity for our students and writing an informative, thoughtful blog can become part of their portfolio as they search for jobs in the future.  The class should follow at least one but hopefully a few blogs from the beginning of the term.  The instructor might provide a discussion time each week to discuss what is covered in the selected blogs.  Students may even be encouraged to respond to those blogs. Students will read and select their top three history blogs and share those with classmates.  After using blogs for a while, students will write their own blog post about a duel either assigned by the teacher or selected by the students.  (Students could be asked to blog about anything but this carries home the theme of the blog duel that will come later in the lesson and that individual disagreements occur and can be taken too far even by our leaders.)  Students will post their blog into a discussion or closed blogging tool.   Students will read each others’ blog and select their favorites for a blogging duel.  The dueling blogs will post additional articles and the class will evaluate them for accuracy and interest and vote for their winner.  (Just like in a real duel, there has to be a winner).

Steps and Instructor Notes:

1. Blogs can be a great addition to the curriculum in your classroom on a daily basis.  Select a blog that is appropriate for your class and follow it on a regular basis from the beginning of your term.  This could be done as an ongoing discussion or a kick off for each Monday.
2. Students will research and select their top three history blogs and share them in a discussion with their classmates.  Their post should include links to the blogs and an evaluation of their quality. 
3. Students will compose their own 400 word blog post describing a historical duel.    The duel can be a verbal debate like the Lincoln-Douglas Debates or an actual duel like Burr and Hamilton.  Students will post this blog in a discussion or other online tool.  Students will vote for their favorite post by a classmate. 
4. The top two bloggers’ will duel for the title of “Best Class Blogger.”  The two bloggers will post additional articles on historical topics of their own interest.  The class will evaluate their posts for accuracy and other qualities the class determines using the earlier evaluation remarks they made about public blogs.  The class will select the “winner” based on criteria they establish.

Rubric is based on 100 points total but this assignment is very organic and is as much about participation and collaboration as composing a blog post.  Simply put, done right students will be motivated to participate in this without points and will be exposed to specific historical facts as well as blogging/writing techniques.

10 points-Student submitted their top 3 blogs and described the qualities of each.
50 points-Student posted a grammatically sound 400 word post about a duel that described who, what, where, when, why, and the historical significance.  Student read and voted for the best blogs in the class. 
50 points-Either student was nominated for best blog and kept writing or student helped create criteria to evaluate “best” bloggers and voted for best.

Blogs that might be useful:

Throwing Down the Gauntlet History's 7 Most Famous Duels - http://newsonrelevantscience.blogspot.com/2012/06/throwing-down-gauntlet-historys-7-most.html  

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/

http://ushistoryfiles.wordpress.com/

http://ushistorysite.blogspot.com/

http://blog.americanhistory.si.edu/                       

A list of blogs- http://www.blog4history.com/2010/11/top-50-american-history-blogs-2/

President's Day: Creating a Trifold Brochure

Learning Objectives:
1. Evaluate examples of historical trifold brochures.
2. List qualities of a good trifold brochure.
3. Locate pictures and research facts about a museum /historical location to include in the brochure.
4. Create an attractive, well written, historically accurate brochure to attract visitors to a historical location/ museum.

Summative Assignment

Outcome: Students will create a historically accurate, well written trifold brochure to attract visitors to a historical location or museum and share that brochure with classmates.

Assignment Description: There are many purposes for historical writing in addition to a research paper. Historians who curate museums and historical sites may be asked to create a trifold brochure to attract visitors to their site. Our students can model this process of sharing historically interesting information that also markets a location to visitors to increase visitation. First, students should become familiar with trifold brochures by examining and evaluating qualities of some brochures that they think effectively convey information and draw visitors to their site. Instructors should select a theme from a certain period to compliment the current unit of study and assign each student a different location. For the purposes of this post, we will use historic homes of U.S. presidents. Students should then research their location and collect interesting facts, images, and other information that would be appropriate for the brochure. Finally, the student will create the brochure and share it with classmates.

Steps and Instructor Notes:
1. The instructor and students collect examples of historical site brochures and examine commonalities and effectiveness. (Students and instructors can collect these at the airport, restaurants, tourism centers, etc.)
2. The class will visit resources on how to create an effective trifold brochure such as the website at the University of Florida.
3. Students will meet in small groups examining the brochures they collected and discussing what they learned about creating effective trifold brochures. They will create a list of qualities they think should be included in a good brochure. (A collective list created by the class and instructor could be used as an evaluation/rubric tool at the end of the project to grade the trifolds.)
4. The student will research and collect facts and images to include in his/her own brochure about one President’s home.
5. The student will create a visually appealing, grammatically sound and organized trifold brochure that contains accurate historical information about the President’s home.
6. The class will share their brochures with one another. Some assignment options are to have the class evaluate each other’s brochures based on a rubric generated from the discussion the class had about the qualities of a good brochure. The class could also rank the top three brochures based on those qualities. Regardless of how you decide to evaluate the brochures, this sharing part is essential as students will learn about Presidential history and get ideas for later assignments by seeing each other’s work.

Rubric is based on 100 points total but it is likely this assignment would take several days and is very dependent on participation which could be evaluated many different ways. For the purposes of this post, the rubric only evaluates the trifold brochure:
20 points-Student created a trifold brochure that is visually appealing and provides enough content to interest the reader.
10 points- The back panel includes credits and additional contact information.
20 points- The inside three panels contain historically accurate information that informs the reader about the historic home and President.
30 points-Student included at least 1 image and 10 facts regarding the location.
20 points-Overall the student composed a grammatically sound and well organized document.

History Research Paper Series--First Draft

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and are ready to start thinking again about scaffolding your research papers.

There are several different approaches that you might take with the next step which is composing the rough draft. You might suggest to students that they have peers, friends, and family read and review their rough draft. You might also suggest that they read the document out loud to themselves or a friend to start catching awkward phrases or mistakes.

I like to use an optional discussion where students post their rough draft for classmates to review and provide feedback. The advantage of this is that students get multiple perspectives from other students who understand the parameters of the assignment. I usually give bonus points (5 points) to the student for just taking the time to put their rough draft in the discussion and additional bonus points (up to 5 points) for taking the time to thoughtfully review a classmates’ paper. It is helpful to reviewing students to provide a rubric or other tools when evaluating the papers so they can provide the most useful feedback to their classmates without sounding overly critical or harsh. I announce to students that I will not read the papers in the discussion, so they feel less risk about showing work that might not be polished. However, I also state I will monitor the discussion for questions and positive, thoughtful correspondence.

Most students seem to understand that the rough draft is a first, second, or even third version of their final paper. They also understand that the rough draft should have citation, quotation, and basic grammar and spelling. However, be sure your students know that the rough draft is to have strong organization and is more than a free writing activity to get thoughts on paper.

For the purposes of this blog, the lesson below is for the student to submit the paper to the instructor to continue the feedback loop presented in other assignments. I do not think that this assignment should be graded except possibly some points for turning it in on time. This is the moment to help students struggling with the writing process and a graded assignment might be too penalizing at this step to encourage improvement.

Objective: Learner will compose a rough draft of their final research paper using the steps prior to this assignment. The rough draft should include a strong thesis statement, demonstrate research on the topic including a Works Cited or Bibliography section, and must be well organized with a concluding statement.

Assignment type: Formative

Assignment Details:
Student will compose a rough draft of their final paper. The rough draft must include the following:
1. Thesis Statement
2. Researched details as examples in the body
3. Works Cited or Bibliography and in-text citation
4. Strong organization of thoughts and ideas

Student will submit the assignment to the instructor for feedback and review. (In my courses the assignments can immediately be run through a plagiarism detector and can be marked up using that tool. Students can see the plagiarism report and this can save many students from accidentally plagiarizing on the graded final version. Additionally, this is a good opportunity to require students to submit some questions about their paper or to have a live session with the instructor to discuss areas for improvement.)

There is no rubric included for this assignment because the focus should be on encouraging your student to improve the assignment for the final version.