American Holocaust Organization Conference(fin)

Editor's Notes

1. This slide should have Mary’s name and contact info?
2. "Technology helps overcome the two enemies of learning: isolation and abstraction.“ George Lucas (If Mary wants to start with a quote) ---Facing History has grown from that single innovative course, to become a worldwide organization that enables transformative dialogue, fosters empathy and reflection, and improves students’ academic performance. Through rigorous investigation of the events that led to the Holocaust and other recent examples of genocide and mass violence, students in a Facing History class learn to choose knowledge over misinformation, compassion over prejudice or bullying, and participation over indifference or resignation. It’s active—rather than passive—learning. Our relationship with technology- critically thinking (and experiencing) how technology can help us reach our goals has long been part of our “journey” as an organization. You will see three bullets of stats here to give you an example of that- one is on our website, one on our follow up work with educators and one on our online PD…..details of these three main threads that will be highlighted in the following slides --First bullet on website- NEED DATA FROM ELIJAH - Early adopters of having a basic website up on the web and since then we went from a few pages to several thousand Second bullet - Follow up with Educators Mary can speak to this from personal experience – she did most of the training s in areas where we did not have an office… Facing History and Ourselves: A Brief Guide to our Work states, “Educators in the Facing History network receive one-on-one follow-up from our staff, the opportunity to participate in workshops and community events, and access to Facing History’s wealth of resources”.   In an effort to serve educators in parts of the United States and Canada who are not geographically close to these offices, the North America Project team was officially formed at Facing History in 2002. The mission of the North America Project is threefold:   To introduce Facing History and Ourselves to new teachers and schools To provide follow-up services via technology to teachers who have already been to a Facing History workshop or institute To develop and pilot distance-learning tools for all eight Facing History and Ourselves offices and members of the program staff.   The idea is to provide that same commitment to the teachers they serve regardless of their geographical isolation to our offices and staff. Third bullet- History of our online courses After about two years in development our first online course launched in 2003. I will share latter in how we have grown this effort and are constantly re-fining and exploring what the online prof. development experience looks like for FH educators. ________________________ ---I hope in this presentation to share with you some of the challenges, successes, lessons learned and questions we have explored. Three main questions this presentation addresses: How do we use new technology to expand on FH 35 years of what has worked in teacher PD for teaching the Holocaust? How do we take advantage of new opportunities technology offers for improving teaching and learning in the classroom? What are we excited about going forward?
3. There are a variety of ways we use technology in FH work… these are the ways they manifest into our online offerings. >>>>I think Mary can mention here that internally we look toward tech for knowledge sharing etc.
4. Is this more like big paper- a silent conversation than gallery walk? Or maybe put both and say- In FH prof dev. educators wear many hats- that of student learning new scholarship and history and that of an educator thinking about how to bring this into the classroom in the most impactful way for students. One way we do this is to have teachers experience new teaching strategies that allow students to slow down conversation, have silent reflection and dialogue. Two we use for this are big paper and gallery walk…..
5. Padlet is one of many tools that allow you create different interactive learning experiences- one might be to create a virtual bulletin board or a place to put up thoughts in the way we did on big paper- participants can easily access it and add “post-it” note like thoughts to a question or an image.
6. Hedrick- I might move this up- since you could say ….FH starts with a look at identity..one way we do this is by having educators and students create identity charts….
7. This is one free online mapping tool we have found replaces our “traditional” identity map. However, with over 70% of students ages 13-16 creating online- new media opens the door to how they would show and share their identity in new ways. Even our “traditional” concept of students’ identity changes when we think about how students are interacting online- many are trying on different identities or choosing to share different parts of their identity in social media spaces. FH teachers are often bringing these digital age identity conversations to the classroom. Our courses give educators a chance to try out some of these online tools they may use with their students too.
8. Sometimes get more than 1000 people on workshops. Online discussions are very active. New embedded Twitter feed allows us to broaden discussions across multiple groups of people going through PD.
9. Focus here should be on FH Scholarship and importance of multiple perspectives and voice in teaching history. Allows us to bring in scholars and survivors Examples Mary can speak too…. Rena in online course Ben Ferenz in Reckoning workshop Webinar you did Mary Webinar series- authors, filmmakers, …staff
10. Pre-work to help build community and a common vocabulary and framework of what we will be doing during the face to face professional development is done online prior. Sometimes follow up and extension work is done online following the gathering. Information during F2F is curated online for easy reference and homework. --Mary can speak to doing the first hybrid in 2003 in New Jersey and how we used it to change the face to face agenda- and learn where expertise in the group lied
11. Although FH’s main way of impacting students is through the education and training of their teachers – we have also had the opportunity to learn with and from students directly on a number of new media projects. This work has impacted the way we are thinking about students and teachers use of new media – both inside the classroom and outside the class. Might need to explain how this relates to Holocaust education (Scope and Sequence) I will quickly tell you about a few of these projects…
12. This was one of our first student projects- valuing the importance of story and voice – we set up a platform for students from the US (Memphis and Boston) to talk with students in S. Africa about the history of voting in both countries. We had them interview people in their communitites around the same three essential questions on voting, community and sharing of stories. FH then used its network of speakers and asked the same questions- Terrance Roberts, Albie Sacks and others….. Therefore forming a digital library of over 70 voting stories – from students, parents, to well known historical figues….
13. One big committment we took in helping us learn and understand the landscape of technology in education was to form the DMIN. This began about five years ago with funding from the Righteous Person foundation and the Ford Foundation. FH has had a long history of teaching with documentary film and we wanted to explore how this might look different using new media. This pilot year culminated in over 550 kids from classes in the US, S. Africa, China, and England in an online exchange of classroom video projects. Extensive evaluation taught us a lot about not only the training, skills, and new ways of thinking about new media that are important for educators- but also how students are using and learning with technology. There are opportunities to bring students together around meaningful learning and resources to create a true global classroom. In addition, we learned the empowerment and voice students are given with creating their own media to share. Reference book article (add in title) - We have kept the DMIN group together to do subsequent projects as well. Some goals of DMIN Provide teachers with the opportunity to experience new media applications and reflect on their roles in students’ lives – Help teachers gain a better understanding of how the use of technology in the learning process can change the dynamics between teachers and students – Increase teachers’ skill and comfort level with digital technology – Model and provide opportunities for teachers to integrate technology-based activities into their teaching – Identify the media literacy skills needed in today’s world and provide guidance on how they can be taught and experienced in a classroom – Create safe online environments for students and teachers to express and understand different perspectives
14. Talk about evaluation that shows positive results. “Dialogue Across Difference” chapter from Becoming Political in a Digital Age.
15. See learning with projects- especially value of connecting students
16. Partnership- in NY- putting students in the role of journalist- building off the DMIN learning
17. Note- please subscribe to blog- great place to send your tech savvy or interested teachers to learn about projects Show glogster posters from online work Explain glogster UDHR and demo links
18. Our print resources will become available as eBooks for iPad, Kindle etc.
19. We currently let teachers create “Paths” which is a way to save a collection of link “bookmarks” for easy access later. We plan to update this feature and call it “Playlists”. Playlists will allow more annotations and tagging and they will also be easy to share which will promote a community of online users.