I recently led a session at the City of Calgary Teachers’ Convention Association meeting here at Mount Royal University titled “Teaching Digital History Skills”. The purpose of this session was to explore some of the key digital tools and technologies used for history research, analysis, communication, and teaching at the university level. In my presentation, I attempted to make the case that history educators should try to incorporate these technologies into their teaching in order to better prepare and train students on how to make better use of these increasingly important digital skills.
Based on a post I wrote a couple of months back, I shared my top five indispensable digital history tools and tried to convey how I attempt to teach these skills in my own classes. I also demonstrated a number of key online repositories for digitized historical primary sources that I use for my own research and teaching. My experiences, of course, are not universal so I invite readers to post their thoughts and comments on this topic in the comments section. How do you teach digital history skills in the classroom?
Mount Royal University History Teacher Symposium 2011 – Sean Kheraj from Anne Marie Goodfellow on Vimeo.
Also, I have posted links to all of the resources I discussed in my presentation below:
Post-Confederation Canadian History Primary Source Analysis Essay Assignments
BC and Confederation, Immigration and the Canadian West, Treaty Five, Bourassa and the Boer War
Neil Selwyn, “The Digital Native — Myth and Reality” Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives 61 (4) 2009: 364-379.[PDF]
Civil War Augmented Reality Project
Nature’s Past Canadian Environmental History Podcast
Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History
Our Future, Our Past: The Alberta Heritage Digitization Project
