Supplementing Texts With Blogs

One of the great issues facing teachers today seems to be to what degree they will incorporate technology into their classrooms. The most fundamental form this takes is whether or not the school will use traditional "bound" books or ebooks on readers such as Kindle or iPads. The big challenge for me is finding a presentation of history or civics that is objective. All authors have bias in their presentations and this usually plays out in the events, people, and narratives advanced in texts. David McCulloch, perhaps our country's best known living historian wrote eloquently about this dilemma in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago. He bemoaned the decline in historical literacy among students in our country and proposed some fundamental changes to the curriculum to rememdy these shortcomings. Reading Richardson's Chapters 3 and 4, and particularly the parts about blogging with students, sparked some ideas about incorporating this important tool into my classroom as a means of complementing, and at times filling in large gaps, in the text presentation.

One way this could be done, and which I tried with my AP Government class, is having them watch excerpts from a debate between Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer on YouTube on the topic of judicial activism versus originalism. You can watch the arguments made by each simply by clicking on his name. Unfortunately, any AP Government textbook I have ever considered using in my class gives little or no treatment to the originalist school of Constitutional interpretation as the authors tend to be on the left of the political spectrum and do not take this school of thought seriously. Although I don't have a blog yet dedicated to my class, I put these links up on Edline, which is the vehicle our school uses to communicate with students and parents. Anticipating a long weekend as a result of the blizzard, I assigned them to watch the excerpts and write a short paper on their understandings of the two judicial philosophies. I can't wait to see what I get on Monday.

Another useful resource for social studies teachers I discovered in this class is American Memory Online which provides both teachers and students with access to over 7,000 primary source documents, The Library of Congress site which has many lesson plans and primary sources, and Thomas which is the official site of Congress and can be used to trck the progress of any piece of legislation. The possibilities are indeed very exciting!