The Third Piece of the Puzzle

I am working to design a lesson that I will use in my own classroom this year to teach students about the role of the Vikings as raiders and traders across Europe and Asia.  I enjoy working with the “stuff” of history and have tried to implement more and more opportunities in my classroom where students learn by being hands on in order to grapple with historical thinking skills.

Teaching the skill of object analysis is a key feature in my classroom.  I find that students are more successful in grappling with visual evidence in primary sources than slogging though archaic texts.  And, since I teach World History, objects are often in far greater abundance than written texts.

While I am designing my main lesson around the Vale of York Hoard, I did set up the Omeka site in a way that will invite more than one exhibit.  The larger site is called Uncovering History, but the idea is that I will have different directories that could house different collections for specific lessons. Students do some work with Roman coins around the time of Caesar, and I can see how I could use this digital space to build a small collection that would make the current iteration of my lesson more streamlined. I can also see how I might eventually add other collections as well.

The other advantage of building an online collection is that it would be more easily shared with other teachers. Instead of poking around in a PDF of a lesson plan, teachers would have access to the lesson resources directly.

While my main audience remains my own classroom use, I am open to the ways in which digital media and publication might be shared with a larger audience.

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