"A Thousand Words About World History"

Here it is.  The above image is the culmination of several evenings, a plethora of tutorials and a few back-and-forth emails.  It's quarter after nine so I thought it best to post this jpeg image as soon as I could.  It was in my interest to "place" this image into my blog so that I could start writing about it's significance in my classroom.  Although extremely rudimentary it does represent as significant lesson and/or concept in my classroom and in my content area.  Let me explain...

1) Students in World History spend the six weeks (almost the entire first quarter) reviewing previous material.  This content includes early civilizations, the age of empires and the middle ages.  This review is meant to serve as a foundation of the complimentary three quarters (the remainder of the 1st semester and all of the 2nd semester).  Students review such topics as classical Greece, the Mongolian horde, Inca empire and the Iroquois confederacy.

2)  Within the first five days of school we pre-test students.  On the seventy question pre-test, the first ten questions actually cover content they should have learned about in seventh grade.  Consistently students missed almost all of the first ten questions.  It became very evident that our opening six weeks ought to be spend reviewing the foundations of history and civilization.

3)  The above jpeg (photoshop image) could be used to help said review.  Over the course of the six weeks each student would be given a copy of the image.  As the six week preview would unfold students would annotate the map.  Annotations include a direct line draw from the historical images to the side of the map.  The students would include a title of the historical figure, approximate dates, and 3-5 important facts about the historical era.

4)  In the end, each historical figure - over the course of six weeks - would be completely annotated.  Visual representation of the content would help organize the concepts of review.

GIF Attempt "My Animated GIF for Teaching"


Swisher Connections (Reflection)


When creating the photoshop image (the annotated map activity) I considered Swisher's "Multimedia Theory" whereby "the presentation of material uses both words and pictures".  The principle, as Mayer states, insists that "students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone."  In my case, the map uses the multimedia theory to combine the map (geography), historical images (connection to historical concepts) and words (added later by the student).

As stated by Swisher, "visuals and multimedia for classroom instruction, instructors should ensure that disparate sources of information...are presented in an integrated format."  In this case, the map integrates the topics on top of the geographic locations where they would be located.  The multimedia theory principle applies in that students would use visuals and words to connect information and concepts.

All of the images, except for the hoplite image, were found on Creative Commons. The hoplite image was found using google and no copyrights could be found.  When I dug deeper I found the image on several historical websites but could not ascertain a copyright indication.