Friday, January 27, 2017

Queen Njinga Mbande - African Women You Need to Know

Studying the slave trade in World History?

Here's an excellent short clip about the Angolan Queen Njinga Mbande. She led the Mbundu people in present day Angola in the 17th century. She negotiated with the Portuguese and fought against them to protect her country's independence, which is why she is known as the "warrior queen."

And when the she first negotiated with the Portuguese, she refused to sit on the floor while her counterpart sat in an armchair. Her maid couched all fours so the queen could sit on her back and face her Portuguese counterpart on equal footing!

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Why do Sikhs Wear Turbans?

Sutori Digital Timelines

If you have never tried Sutori, you should. It's a great app and very easy for students to learn and master.

Students can create their own time timelines in history as well other subjects.

Check out this one on German and Italian unification by one of my students. Here's another.

And here's how Sutori works.
  1.  Create a free teacher account with your name and a password. 
  2.  Next, create a class and give it a name. Sutori generates a code for your class. 
  3.  Provide your students with the weblink to your class and code. 
  4.  Students then log in with a user name and password. 
There are plenty of possibilities for Sutori in other disciplines as well. In English, students might summarize a story or the development of a main character and in math, students might show the order of a math equation.

Friday, January 6, 2017

Teaching Context in AP World

Teaching context?

I have been working with students on context in AP World and trying to help them understand how to do it in their DBQs.

I was able to drive the point home when I showed them the first 15 minutes of PBS, Egalite for All about Toussaint L'Overture and the Haitian Revolution.

As the documentary opens, the narrators tell us a little about Haiti and then move to the French Revolution. I stopped the video and asked students why the narrator had moved to France. After all, this was a video about Haiti. I told them that the narrator was providing context.

And as the video progressed, I stopped it again to remind students that the development of context was not just a sentence. After all, the narrator of this documentary was spending five minutes discussing it.

Finally,  as the narrator moved back to Haiti, I stopped the video again and had students listen to the connecting sentence where the narrator connected the context to the Haitian Revolution.

It’s kind of cool when we can review these challenging concepts in different ways.