Mr. Carl was back for the Grey Day with the honors classes and Feel the History. I told him how everything went and I felt that I handled the class pretty well with while he was gone. After talking about the tweaking I did to the lesson plan, we decided to use the crash course history video to go over Reconstruction and stop it at certain sections in the video to go over critical points. I think this was an effective strategy for the honors classes, but at the end it might have been better to have more of a follow up in order to make sure all of the key concepts had stuck. However, it did leave time for Mr. Carl to hand out the DBQ (document based questions) assignment, which is a staple of the Honors History program at Reitz. The students study documents and answer questions, eventually working towards writing five paragraph essays by the second semester.
The Feel the History class took a field trip to USI. They met the main archivist at the University and she went over the various online resources that were available as well as the archive. The new tool that was really cool is that all of the past newspapers in Indiana have been turned into digital resources from the microfilm and are searchable by keywords in an online database. That is going to make research for the documentaries a lot easier and give much more time for more editing and interviews. It was also important to see how to facilitate this type of connection and trip from the teacher standpoint and how important it is to make sure students are responsible in a class with as much freedom as being able to drive somewhere on your own.
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