My students need an Elmo to project primary and secondary documents they can analyze for their learning as well as project historical documents they can annotate.
Do you ever remember analyzing historical documents and searching for the "truth" all by yourself in your American History class? My students are always analyzing and researching historical documents to find answers in the stories of the past.
Almost 120 eighth grade students enter my classroom everyday.
Getting them excited about history is my job! This is not easy, but challenging their thinking and making them the investigators has been beneficial. I have found that through analyzing primary and secondary documents, the students have started to take ownership of their learning and have begun to enjoy opening the envelope to the past. They have begun to understand the value in not taking another's word for fact, but finding the facts, investigating the information, and finally coming to a conclusion about what is important.
I currently use a very inexpensive document projector that is constantly going in and out of focus, cannot project the whole image, and does not even have it's own light source. This is really painful when trying to display the actual historical writings of John Smith, images of patriot propaganda, and the Declaration of Independence.
My Project
The lesson I am going to share with you is like many others I am trying to incorporate in my classroom. It is common core aligned and makes the students analyze, investigate, and come to conclusions on their own. I showed the students the clip of Pocahontas saving John Smith from the Disney movie, Pocahontas. The students were immediately engaged! Who doesn't love Disney? From there I displayed the actual time line of Pocahontas's life. It shows she was only 10 years old when this event supposedly took place.
From there the students were shown two actual writings of John Smith. In his first book, he never mentions this event occurring and in his second, talks about it and mentions Pocahontas saving him.
We discuss why a person would have two different accounts of this event. What changed between his writings? We then analyzed secondary sources written by famous historians speculating what actually is fact and what is fiction in the "saving" of John Smith.
The students reread these accounts and discuss in small groups.
The final assignment is to answer the question: Did Pocahontas save John Smith? They must give evidence from the text to support their stance.
My problem is having a document projector that will not stay focused and does not project the whole writing. Students are constantly having to stop to move the page and get the camera focused. An Elmo that will project these historical documents would be so beneficial to my students.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Athmer and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.