Queen City heritage : the journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society (F486 .H653)
and, since 2001,
Ohio Valley history : the journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society and the Filson Historical Society (F486 .H579)

Timeline, the Ohio Historical Society’s magazine features heavily illustrated articles on a wide variety of topics (F486 .T55)

Ohio History: the journal of the Ohio Historical Society is available through the Electronic Journals Center at the WSU Library. Search under Electronic Journals for “Ohio History.” You will need to login to access the text of the journal articles.

May 12 “Wright Brothers’ Dayton”

May 19 “Goodbye, the Levee has broken, the Story of the Great Dayton Flood”

May 26 “When Dayton Went to War”

In addition, ThinkTV works with the Ohio Farm Bureau to produce the series, “Our Ohio” with a focus on rural Ohio. This series includes segments on Ohio history, historic sites, writers, and artists. You will find streaming videos for topics that include World War II, the National Road, canals, waterways, Sunwatch Village, the Underground Railroad, Ripley, the Ohio Amish, and Fort Ancient. ThinkTV also offers K-12 resources for teachers and students related to each of these video segments.

One page worksheets for the analysis of written documents, artifacts, cartoons, maps, motion pictures, photographs, posters, and sound recordings are available to download from the National Archives.

History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web offers “Making Sense of History” a collection of tutorials and examples for the analysis and interpretation of these and other types of historical documents.

The American Memory Project Learning Page (the Library of Congress) also offers activities and lesson plans related to learning about American history with primary sources. In the “Port of Entry” activity, offers the following questions for analyzing written sources.

1. Who created the source and why? Was it created through a spur-of-the-moment act, a routine transaction, or a thoughtful, deliberate process?
2. Did the recorder have firsthand knowledge of the event, or did the recorder report what others saw or heard?
3. Was the information recorded during the event, immediately after the event, or after some lapse of time? How large a lapse of time?
4. Was the recorder a neutral party, or did the recorder have a position, opinions or interests that might have influenced what was recorded?
5. Did the recorder wish to inform or persuade others?
6. Was the source meant to be public or private? Was it produced for personal use, for one or more individuals, or for a large audience?

You will find primary sources for Ohio history by clicking on the Ohio History on Delicious heading on the lower right hand menu. I will add more to this list as we progress through Ohio history.

“. . . offers a new and unprecedented history of the people and nature of this storied region.”

Part One, “Time and Terrain” airs on Wednesday, April 9, and explores the environment and traces the history of the region’s cultures up to the arrival of the Europeans. Part Two, “New Green World,” looks at the collision of cultures in the 18th and early 19th centuries. “Mountaintop Revolutions,” looks at the Civil War, and the industries–Railroads and Coal– that impacted the environment, economy, and peoples of Appalachia. Part Four, “Power and Place” tells the history of the region in the 20th Century. Appalachia stretches through Southeastern Ohio and it sounds like much of this series will be relevant to our study of Ohio history. “Appalachia: a History of Mountains and People” is produced by the non-profit James Agee Film Project.

Part I , April 9, 10 pm
Part II, April 16, 10 pm
Parts III & IV, April 30, 9 pm

Check the ThinkTV (Dayton Public Television) broadcast schedule for details.

I have written in the past about both Digital Storytelling and project based learning. The Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University offers a portal to Digital Storytelling resources for teachers including three examples. The first, “Chocolate Innocence” is a good brief example of student media project.

National History Day offers 6-12th grade students opportunities to compete, much like a science fair, with research-based history papers, performances, exhibits, documentaries, and web sites. Take a look at this award winning 2007 collaborative middle school media project, “The Great Seattle Fire, Phoenix of the Northwest.”

For more ideas, read the National History Day guides and resources for producing both Documentaries and Web Sites. The judging guide and forms also provide a good check for the quality of your project. As you can see, the first NHD goal is to produce a high quality, research-based project. For future teachers, the Dayton Public Schools have participated in National History Day for the past six years – a model project may be a good item for your portfolio.

Please keep in mind that you may decide to use the WordPress platform itself and the skills that you learn from blogging to produce a digital exhibit for this project.

Course Design

In designing the course around student research, discovery, peer review and media production, I gave a lot of thought to ideas from a recent publication about the Visible Knowledge Project: Viet Nguyen “Multimedia as Composition: Research, Writing, and Creativity” as well as Peter Burkholder and Anne Cross, “Video Killed the Term Paper: Two Views.” I agree with Burkholder’s conclusions:

. . . having graded thousands of history papers, I am fully aware that students need help with their writing, and I firmly believe that papers have a central role to play in history courses. But this does not mean educators should shy away from building new paths to learning. . .

The first impetus for this approach to teaching came from following the Center for History and New Media’s Digital Campus podcasts and from reading a series of posts on “The End of Western Civilization as we Know It” from T. Mills Kelly’s blog Edwired.

Tour the Ohio Historical Society’s online resource, “First Ohioans” and learn more about their archaeological projects and exhibits. Open Ohio History Central’s “Ohio’s Prehistoric Timeline” to learn about the chronology and cultures of Native peoples before European exploration and settlement in the Ohio Valley. You can save the timeline to your desktop and then open it and zoom in on different time periods.

To set up Google Reader, you must first create a GMail account. Go to http://www.google.com, select IGoogle in the upper right hand corner, and follow the instructions to set up an account. You can then use your Gmail and password to log into other Google applications. Go to the Google Reader Tour to learn how to set up your reader and subscribe to your groups’ blog posts. I view GoogleReader through the IGoogle home page.

My IGoogle page.

This is what my RSS Reader looks like:

My RSS reader

.

To subscribe to an RSS feed, go to the blog or website that you want to follow. If there is an RSS feed, you will see a square blue button in the URL line. Click on the button and follow the links to add this subscription to your reader. If you want to read about history in the news, subscribe to Breaking News from the History News Network.

You can also watch “RSS in Plain English” in YouTube.

In order to make a link:
-copy the URL for the page that you want to link to,
-select the HTML tab for your post,
-in your post, highlight or “select” the name of the site that you want to link to,
-click on the blue highlighted link button in the controls and a box will pop up,

When the HTML tab is selected, you can click on the blue link button.

Copy and paste the URL into this box and click OK.

Embedding an image from another site

To add images or media to your website, click where you want the image to appear in your post and then select an Upload/Insert media button above the tools.

Select add image or other media.

You can upload and add an image from your computer or you can embed an image from another URL.

Select an image from your computer.

Add an image from another web page by its URL.

The Dayton VA Medical Center (North of HWY 35 at Gettysburg) offers a fascinating “Virtual Museum” highlighting the site’s history as a National Military Home created to provide care for Civil War veterans. Visitors click on a bird’s eye view of the 1885 site to tour different buildings and areas.

When you click on an image inside the exhibit, you will be able to look at the full image on a separate page. This page gives you the image URL. You can embed the image in your page using this URL.

Grotto and Lakes, Virtual Museum, Dayton VA Medical Center.

The basic html code for an image looks like this:

html code to embed an image from another site

You should always cite the source and provide a link to the page if you are using their information, quoting their text, or showing one of their images.

Some museums and other sites do not offer a separate URL for images and media.

Check out WordPress Support for more guidance.