If you had a $5,000 classroom gift to give to a teacher for changing your life, who would you give it to?
At the Toronto office here at Facing History, we know so many teachers who work tirelessly and selflessly to give students learning experiences, words of wisdom, encouragement, and kindness to make meaningful change in their students' lives.
Topics: Choosing to Participate, Facing History Together, Innovative Classrooms
Note-taking is an important learning strategy that can help prepare students to participate in a discussion or begin a writing activity. Notes can be used to recognize students’ misconceptions and questions, and to evaluate students’ understanding of material.
As educators, we all too often do not teach our students effective note-taking strategies, assuming instead that this skill is something that they will learn to do intuitively.
Topics: History, Innovative Classrooms, Technology, Metacognitive startegies, Strategies, Lesson Ideas, English Classroom
Over the past three months Facing History and Ourselves, in partnership with Regent Park Focus and with funding from Mozilla Hive Community Projects, worked with students from several Toronto District School Board high schools to create short radio pieces exploring issues important to local youth. This project was called RadioZilla.
Topics: Choosing to Participate, Facing History Resources, Identity, EdTech, Innovative Classrooms, Media Skills, Technology, Radiozilla, Inside a Genocide Classroom, Personal history
Six years ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a public apology on behalf of all Canadians for the residential schools the government of Canada created in the 19th century that plagued the fabric of Canadian history for generations to come. Between 1880 and 1996, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children were forced into Indian residential schools and thousands did not survive. Those that did survive suffered a loss of language, culture, family, and self. Many suffered abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to care for them.
Topics: Art, Choosing to Participate, Human Rights, History, Innovative Classrooms, Memorial, We and They, Culturally Responsive and Relevant Pedagogy, Social Justice
This semester Facing History students from across the greater Toronto area have been busy learning the ins and outs of digital storytelling - writing, editing, interviewing, and developing media skills in order to produce on social justice-oriented radio segments that will broadcast on Radio Regent. The youth-led audio documentaries will explore critical topics such as identity, bystander behaviour, religion, upstanders in history and today, and standing up for others.
Topics: Art, Events, EdTech, Innovative Classrooms, Media Skills, Technology, Radiozilla
A couple of weeks ago, this anti-immigration flyer circulated around Brampton, Ontario.
Topics: Choosing to Participate, Human Rights, Identity, Innovative Classrooms, current events, We and They, In the news, CHG, Social Justice
Today Facing History announced the recipients of its annual Margot Stern Strom Innovation Awards, which grew out of a teaching award established in 2006 to recognize Facing History-trained educators who are thinking outside-the-box to transform schools and impact student learning.
This year, we awarded over $42,200 to fund 19 classroom projects around the world that focus on technological innovation and collaborative learning, including one of our own educators in Canada!
Topics: Art, Identity, Innovative Classrooms, CHG
“Sir, it keeps happening again and again. We don’t learn. I don’t think we’re going to get better. There doesn’t seem to be much hope.”
Three years ago a grade 12 student said this to me in my West and the World class. Every so often it echoes in my head. She was doing a research paper on Rwanda and the United Nations, and had done a significant amount of reading on the topic and she was passionately upset about how the world had allowed the Rwandan Genocide to happen.
Topics: Innovative Classrooms, genocide, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanities Course, Lesson Ideas, CHG, Inside a Genocide Classroom, Social Justice, reflection
After recently watching the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with my sons, a thought hit me. In the movie, Indiana accidently comes across the gigantic map room where Nazis are secretly planning their conquests. Leaders and rulers – and everyday citizens – throughout history (like Winston Churchill, for example) have had map rooms. My students needed one too.
Topics: Art, Innovative Classrooms, Museum Studies, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanities Course, CHG
Facing History Offers IWitness Webinars for Teachers May 9 and May 14 2013
In May 2013, Facing History will offer two free webinars for educators on powerful ways to use the IWitness tool.
Topics: Events, History, Innovative Classrooms, Media Skills, Holocaust Education, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanities Course