The Presidential Timeline Project team will be hosting a 4-day teacher institute, July 9-12, 2009, on The University of Texas at Austin campus.  This year’s conference is titled The Social Studies Classroom: Presidential Decision Making, Historical Reasoning, and Digitized Primary Sources.  The conference will feature scholars from the fields of political science, social studies education, instructional technology, and digital archives.

Any interested secondary social studies teacher is welcome to apply.  Through federal funding, we are able to offer teachers a $100 daily stipend for each day of the 4-day conference and we have blocked off rooms right near campus at a very reasonable rate.  We will utilize the facilities of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and the Learning Technology Center, both located on the UT-Austin campus.  We feel this will be a great learning experience for all teachers that attend.  

We have created a website with information about the institute.  Click here to visit the site and be sure to click on “Registration Information” in the navigation menu on the left side to fill out our Teacher Application if you are interested in attending.  We will notify all teachers that apply by May 8th.

Thanks and we hope to hear from you!

The Presidential Timeline Project Team

All of our educational activities should be back to full functionality now, but we are having some trouble with the Gallery. We’re working on it as we speak and expect the problem to be resolved quickly.

We’re currently experiencing a problem with our educational activities not displaying properly in Internet Explorer. They are working fine in all other browsers that we have checked. We are working as we speak to resolve the problem.

We’ve improved the printing capabilities within the Presidential Timeline to facilitate printing of the documents/images that are contained within the Timeline. Anytime you are in the Record Viewer window you can click the PRINTABLE button at the lower right. Originally, the only printing option available was to print the page using your web browser’s print command. This would print the entire page – including the metadata – and would often chop the document/image in half between pages. We’ve now added a “print this image” button that will print only the document/image itself.

In an effort to provide avenues for study in emerging social studies scholarship, the Presidential Timeline Blog offers an ever-growing resource list for interested educators and/or enthusiasts.  The list will focus primarily on issues related to historical thinking and the use of primary sources in the social studies classroom.  You can access the list by clicking on ‘Recommended Readings’ under the ‘About’ heading to the left.  It has several new additions; we hope you will take a look.  The list also supports comments.  We welcome questions about individual resources, suggestions for additional resources, or remarks about the list in general.  Enjoy.

The NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) originally released its Curriculum Standards in 1994. Rather than being a set of content standards for various disciplines within the social studies, the Curriculum Standards describe a thematic approach that can serve as a framework for the creation of a rich and dynamic set of content standards in any social studies discipline. The Curriculum Standards are based around ten themes. The draft for the updated version of these ten themes is available here:

http://communities.ncss.org/node/269

More on the revision effort in general is available here:

http://communities.ncss.org/standardsrevision

I’m currently reading Sam Wineburg’s pivotal volume – Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. The book looks at traditional views of how history is and has been taught, but ultimately at what history instruction has the potential to be – a vehicle for fostering high-level critical thinking skills and establishing a strong sense of personal place in the story of humanity. Quoting Wineburg from the introduction to the book:

The essays in this book begin with the basic assumption that history teaches us a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when necessary—about the stories we tell.

Undoubtedly these are invaluable skills that we would like for all students to possess.

I’m going to be sharing my thoughts on this volume as I read it and would welcome thoughts from others in the Presidential Timeline community (if you’ve somehow happened upon this blog and find something of value here, consider yourself to be part of this community). Keep in mind that all of this comes from a guy whose background consists of undergraduate and graduate study in the natural sciences, 11 years teaching secondary level physics, 7 years developing educational applications, mostly in math, computer science, and the natural sciences – seemingly somewhat dubious qualifications for my current area of focus, the Presidential Timeline project.

I am delighted to announce that we have added several hundred new objects to the Presidential Timeline.

Initial additions were made to the Carter timelines, many of them related to the Iran hostage crisis, but also including some others from Early Life and Career. These objects were added entirely “by hand” which took somewhere in the vicinity of 20 to 30 minutes each (and that does refer to EACH page of a multipage document).

For some time, we have been working on a tool (a php application, for those who care) to automate some of this process. We first tried the tool with 78 new images and 15 new audio files for the FDR timeline, then followed up by adding 119 objects (a total of 380 pages) to the Ford timelines.

The tool worked quite well, doing its part of the processing at the rate of about 10 seconds per page. Keep in mind that there are SEVEN different versions of each page/image in the system – two different sizes of thumbnails, two different sizes of images in the Flash version, and three different sizes of images in the html version. All told, it took about 15 hours to add these objects to the timeline. (There’s more work beyond that which the tool accomplishes.)

The bottom line is that we now have a total of 944 objects on the Presidential Timeline, up by 226 since the initial rollout (718 objects)!