Artifact #3: Digital History (TE831)

Goal: N/A
Standards: 4, 5
Resource: Digital History: Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Research
Web Address: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/
Content Area & Grade Level: Secondary Social Studies Classes
This artifact is also a resource (Tech Tool) that I use on a weekly basis. This resource is a website that I use to
obtain primary sources for all topics that I teach. This digital history website is a treasure trove of primary
sources that can be used in any secondary level social studies class. I select relevant primary source excerpts
that I want to use in the classes that I teach. I then chunk these texts down so that they are easier to manage for
the kids and then I build a task around the sources. I call these tasks student performance tasks but they can also
be called primary document/source analysis.
This task also represents how I have changed my approach to teaching literacy within my content. Teaching my
students how to analyze primary sources has always been a part of my classroom instruction but this particular
task shows how I have refined and expanded this aspect of my curriculum.
Inspired by a professional development conference I attended at Oakland Schools, I have created performance
tasks for my students based upon the information presented to me at the conference. The task is entitled The
Cold War Primary Document Analysis Packet and it consists of three different parts. The first part requires
students to read and analyze four primary sources (some of the excerpts were obtained from the digital history
website) from the Cold War era and answer several reading comprehension questions after each document
(within the packet itself). The second part requires students to complete the Source Comparison Graphic
Organizer and the third and final part is a writing task that requires students to apply what they have learned to
a new scenario.
I believe this task is important because it pushes students beyond the usual surface level reading of texts and
requires them to display higher level thinking. I ensure that students are given the appropriate scaffolding for
this task by modeling how to complete all of the three parts for the first document and by giving a differentiated
reading guide to students with lower reading comprehension skills which assists them in finding the information
needed to answer the questions and complete the graphic organizer (in addition to previously teaching a lesson
on the Berlin Airlift/Crisis of 1948 so that the students have the required prior knowledge to complete the
writing task).