Aaron Gulyas
- Mott Community College, Flint Michigan
- Website: www.ajgulyas.com
- Twitter: firkon
I teach 100- and 200-level history course (online and onground) at Mott Community College, in Flint Michigan. By training, I'm an Americanist but--as do most community college instructors--I also teach World History survey courses as well as a variety of other things. Academically, My focus centers around Cold War culture and broader questions of paranormal, pseudohistorical, or conspiratorial belief systems and their impact on American society and culture. Pedagogically, I am striving to integrate technology into my teaching in such a way as the students have an opportunity to be active users of educational tech, rather than just audience members for a slideshow. In the past, this has involved the use of blogging within courses and other similar approaches.
My Posts
Entry level historical mapping in the classroom
Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 | ajgulyas
It’s no secret that the geographic knowledge of today’s students (as well as the general American) is not where it should be. This is particularly noticeable in my history classes, where I have learned to include plenty of maps in my class discussions or lectures and–in my online classes–providing brief Camtasia-created voice-overs of historical maps.
But just as I want my students to write as well as read, and talk as well as listen, I would like to develop a way for them to map historical events themselves rather than always relying on the maps which the textbook (or I) provide. The issue I’m having, and what I would very much appreciate talking to fellow THATcampers about is how to best teach my students how to use resources like Google Earth to create maps which contain historical information. While I’ve used Google Earth and Fusion Tables to play with creating maps of my own, I’ve gotten a bit stuck on how to make the transition to teaching these skills and developing assessment activites in the context of a 3 hour per week course that also needs to cover (for example) the history of the world from 1500 to the present.
What tools, resources, and techniques have others used to teach basic historical mapping? How do these activities fit into the assessment of course outcomes (Assessment! Whee!)? I have ideas (well, notions) and look forward to talking about them and learning more about this from colleagues from a variety of disciplines.
