Teaching World History Through Popular Culture

 

The below link illustrates children studying 7th Grade History connecting what they learn in the classroom with popular culture in the world around them. I am very impressed with this idea and I believe it has the potential to not only work in conjunction with teaching History but also within Religious Education as we are constantly looking to find ways to connect certain topics within Religious Education with the personal lives of our students.

Would you be interested in doing something like this is your classroom? 🙂

 

The Parables of Jesus

 

Here are a selection of worksheets which will help students to question the meaning behind the Parables. Very useful resource for the classroom as it can be used for both group work and individual student activity. They are also excellent homework activities.

http://www.padfield.com/acrobat/asher/parables.pdf

 

  

 

Teacher Motivation

For any teachers today struggling to shake off their morning blues before they enter the classroom. 🙂

Also, for all NQTs like myself struggling to find employment and to stay positive during this challenging time for teachers the video below will help to remind you of the reasons why we chose this career path and the significance of our role as educators. 🙂

White Smoke in Rome 1978

On this day October 16th 1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected as new Pope, John Paul II. 🙂

Thesis thoughts: Women in leadership roles within Education

For my Thesis I have decided to explore the area of women in leadership focusing specifically on women in leadership roles within education. The prospect of writing about this topic got me thinking about what are the main issues faced by women in leadership roles or in pursuit of leadership roles within the area of education. This lead me to three issues in particular which I think could serve as building blocks for investigating what kind of relationship women have with leadership within education and if this relationship does exist what problems and challenges does this relationship bring to the doorstep of women in the area of education today? 🙂

Three points of discussion related to this topic:

1. Gender Equality: Although people may say teaching has become a somewhat feminine profession it is noticeable that many of the higher job positions within Education remain quite male dominated. (Eg. Principal and Vice-Principal positions) I would like to know how women can look to not necessarily eliminate men from these positions but rather contribute to ensuring a more balanced ratio between men and women can occur for these positions of leadership.
2. Empowering Young Women: Women are needed to take on leadership roles in order to ensure the success of empowering young women. Young women from second-level education and onwards especially are very impressionable and are in search of the right role model for themselves. Young women can be filled with self-confidence and self-belief just from witnessing women in leadership especially in the area of education.
3. Creating a Sisterhood and Eliminating Negativity: Women need to support one another and women in leadership roles especially in the influential area of education. The creation and encouragement of a sisterhood of women within the educational sector is necessary to prevent the negativity that is seen between women in the corporate world seeping into schools and education departments. Women should all look to create a sisterhood mentality not just within the staffroom but also within the classroom amongst students.

Three questions to be asked in relation to this topic:

1. Is there a gender equality issue in existence within education and if so is more women in leadership roles the solution?
2. Do women in leadership roles within education successfully empower young women?
3. Is it possible to encourage a sisterhood mentality within education both amongst staff and within the classroom?

Budget Day 2014

 

 

Since its Budget Day 2014 today I thought I’d have a look online to see if there are any summaries of the history of the budget in Ireland. I came across the following link on the website http://www.theirishstory.com/ which documents the Irish economy since 1922. This extract would probably be most suited to senior students and I believe it would be possible to incorporate it into both History and Religious Education classes. It could be used as a means of historical fact as well as a means of engaging students in class discussion within a Religious Education class from the perspective of moral-decision making using the example of the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger.

The link to the website is:

Life and Debt – A short history of public spending, borrowing and debt in independent Ireland

 

Handy Horrible Histories

Sometimes a lesson needs some added oomph to capture the students’ imagination. I cannot speak highly enough of the Horrible Histories series and I think they are a wonderful addition to any lesson. Although it may appear that they provide entertainment and laughter to students you will be surprised at how much information the students can absorb from these video clips. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself learning something new whilst having a giggle at the same time! 🙂

The following two links below are a couple of my favourites which depict life during the Roman period and the Medieval times with somewhat of a modern twist 🙂

The History of October 14th….

 

I just came across a very interesting website called http://www.on-this-day.com/ which I think could come in handy in all variates of history classes. The website provides facts about what historical, important and interesting events took place on each day of the year way back when. We spend so much of our time teaching students about the hugely significant historical events which at one point or another during a particular year helped to shape the course of history and life as we know it today. However I think it would be nice to take a few moments either at the beginning or the end of a lesson to reflect upon and connect the present day with its possible significance in the past. Who knows what we might find? 🙂

OCTOBER 14TH 

1066 – The Battle of Hastings occurred in England. The Norman forces of William the Conqueror defeated King Harold II of England.

1879 – Thomas Edison signed an agreement with Jose D. Husbands for the sale of Edison telephones in Chile.

1887 – Thomas Edison and George E. Gouraud reached an agreement for the international marketing rights for the phonograph.

1912 – Theodore Roosevelt was shot while campaigning in Milwaukee, WI. Roosevelt’s wound in the chest was not serious and he continued with his planned speech. William Schrenk was captured at the scene of the shooting.

1922 – Lieutenant Lester James Maitland set a new airplane speed record when he reached a speed of 216.1 miles-per-hour.

1926 – The book “Winnie-the-Pooh,” by A.A. Milne, made its debut.

1928 – The first televised wedding took place in Des Plains, IL. James Fowlkes and Cora Dennison were married in a radio studio.

1930 – Ethel Merman debuted on Broadway in “Girl Crazy.”

1933 – Nazi Germany announced that it was withdrawing from the League of Nations.

1934 – “Lux Radio Theater” began airing on the NBC Blue radio network.

1936 – The first SSB (Social Security Board) office opened in Austin, TX. From this point, the Board’s local office took over the assigning of Social Security Numbers.

1943 – The Radio Corporation of America finalized the sale of the NBC Blue radio network. Edward J. Noble paid $8 million for the network that was renamed American Broadcasting Company.

1944 – German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel committed suicide rather than face execution after being accused of conspiring against Adolf Hitler and the execution that would follow.

1944 – During World War II, the Second British Parachute Brigade liberated the city of Athens.

1947 – Over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California, pilot Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 rocket plane and became the first person to break the sound barrier.

1954 – C.B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”, starring Charlton Heston, began filming in Egypt. The epic had a cast of 25,000 people.

1960 – U.S. presidential candidate John F. Kennedy first suggested the idea of a Peace Corps.

1961 – “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying” opened on Broadway.

1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis began when U.S. reconnaissance aircrafts photographed Soviet construction of intermediate-range missile sites in Cuba.

1964 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent resistance to racial prejudice in America. He was the youngest person to receive the award.

1968 – The first live telecast to come from a manned U.S. spacecraft was transmitted from Apollo 7.

1970 – Anwar el-Sadat became president of Egypt following the death of President Nasser.

1984 – George ‘Sparky’ Anderson became the first baseball manager to win 100 games and a World Series in both leagues.

1986 – Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev charged that the U.S. wanted to “bleed the Soviet Union economically” with the arms race in space.

1987 – Jessica McClure, 18 months old, fell down an abandoned well in Midland, TX. The rescue took 58 hours.

2001 – Toys “R” Us introduced the new version of Geoffrey the giraffe in a 60-second commercial before WABC-TV aired Disney’s “The Emperor’s New Groove.”

2002 – Britain stripped power from the Catholic and Protestant politicians of Northern Ireland. Britain resumed sole responsibility for running Northern Ireland.

2011 – The Apple iPhone 4S was released.

The website also provides us with Famous Birthdays which occur on each day of the year.

On this day 1890, former US President Dwight David Eisenhower was born. 🙂

Review of 21classes.com

We were recently asked to complete a group experiment testing out a couple of different websites catering for both teacher and class blogs. I was in a group with Heather, Niamh and Megan and we were given the task of taking on the website 21classes.com from both the teacher and student perspective. The method we used could be described as homework blogging as each of created a teacher blog with an assignment which we all had to complete for one another. We then had to present our findings on what the website is about, the perspective of the teacher on this blogging website, the perspective of the student on this blogging website and the positives/negatives to using this website in a classroom setting. I took on the job of reviewing the website from a student perspective.

I have very little positives to discuss in relation to the use of a student blog facility on the website 21classes.com. Our group encountered numerous difficulties in most areas when trying to find our way around the website. This made me think about how a student would be able to cope with these difficulties and I came to the conclusion that the problems involved with this website would prove almost impossible for student to overcome. There are a number of examples of these problems.

1. The first problem I personally encountered was that I was unable to receive any invitations from my fellow group members to register with their blog and complete the assignments they had posted. This was particularly frustrating and I felt as though I was being left behind as I couldn’t access any of the teacher blogs despite the fact that the girls had sent me several invitations. This could cause a lot of upset for a student who is trying to complete the school work that is required of them by their teacher through the blog but simply cannot access it. It took me several hours before any of the invitations reached me which could prove another problem for a student if there is a deadline placed on the assignment they are trying to access.

1. This leads me to another issue with the student blog in the form of the registration process once the invitation has been received. The registration process which students have to go through in order to become a member of their teacher’s blog is challenging, time consuming and completely unreliable. Privacy settings within the teacher’s blog can prevent any students being added to the blog however this is not an obvious element of the teacher blog unless the teacher investigates it. The registration process involves the student providing an email address, a username and password. However I encountered a number of problems during the registration process for each of my group members’ blogs. Regarding Megan’s and Niamh’s blogs I was repeatedly told by the website that my email address was incorrect when I was asked to confirm it as well as my password being seen as invalid. When it came to Heather’s blog I was told that my email address was already registered yet I had no access whatsoever to her blog. These registration difficulties are frankly too complex for a young adult to be dealing with and would cause a great deal of stress for the student and also for the teacher if more than one student was dealing with these issues as no clear solution is given.

1. Another issue I noticed with the student blog came to my attention when completing the assignment on Megan’s blog. It was possible for me to see the answers to the assignment questions posted by the student who had logged in before me meaning that students could simply copy one another’s work rather than take the time to read the assignment content, think of the answers to the question or simply learn from the assignment.

If I am completely honest I found this blogging experiment extremely challenging and stressful as this website seems to pose a problem around each and every one of its corners. I understand that this may be the website’s attempt at ensuring that teachers are completely in charge and that students are safe however these attempts of safety and privacy make it almost impossible for a student to successfully set up and use their own blogs.

https://www.21classes.com/

New Religious Movements: Scientology Documentaries

I took part in a New Religious Movements module in Third year and it proved to be an excellent insight into not only the movements themselves but also the resources that can be used to teach senior cycle students the topic of New Religious Movements. We were introduced to an excellent website called Dialogue Ireland which provides an index listing of a variety of New Religious Movements some of which in the past and presently exist in Ireland. Within each New Religious Movement category a vast amount of information, resources and links can be found for further study by teachers and students alike. During my final teaching practice in January 2013 I was given the opportunity to teach Fifth and Sixth Years this topic and the following two documentaries proved particularly interesting to the students and provided a brilliant base upon which class discussion and group work could emerge.

The links below provide guidance around the Dialogue Ireland website as well as links to both documentaries. I found it easiest to use Dialogue Ireland as a means of showing these documentaries to students as each documentary is broken down into parts meaning you don’t have to show the entire documentary but rather points of interest necessary for class understanding, group work or discussion. 🙂

http://www.dialogueireland.org/index.htm

http://www.dialogueireland.org/dicontent/a2z/scientology/index.html

http://www.dialogueireland.org/dicontent/resources/video/panorama2007.html

http://www.dialogueireland.org/dicontent/resources/video/panorama2010.html