Revamping My NHD Materials

I understand that this year will be very different due to our current pandemic situation, but my National History Day materials have needed revamping for some time now, and I know that we will use these resources in the future regardless.

I wanted to change up a lot of my materials to simplify the process for my students. My earlier materials were wordy and students didn't bother to read it all. My new materials still include guidance and information to read, but I feel like the information included is more relevant and straightforward. I will also be supplementing these materials with videos of myself explaining and working through the various processes. Hopefully, modeling this will help both students and guardians/teachers/paraprofessionals who are trying to help students work through these processes.

The first activity that I revised was my "Writing Research Questions" handout. The setup of my original one was just confusing and too broad, so I made this one more specific. It seems long as well, but this is something that we will work on for multiple days as we discuss and practice writing research questions in class, whether in-person or online.

I have also been trying to figure out how to best help students organize their research. In the past, students have made a copy of a "Source Analysis Sheet" where they kept track of information, citations, and annotations from individual sources. These were nice and easy to grade, though students often viewed them as one and done. Students would also simply write down facts that they found and many didn't look at or consider their research questions as soon as they were turned in. Much of the information that students recorded was also the same information they found in previous sources, which was not helpful to them at all in the end.

I have considered using Google Keep or notecards to help students organize research, but these are not easily shareable. Google Keep notes can be shared on a note-by-note basis, but this would mean that I would receive hundreds and hundreds of notes in my inbox every time I collected their research. (The research must be collected and feedback must be given by me, otherwise many students will wait until the last minute or will not know what to do next due to lack of guidance.)

I am currently considering whether Google Sheets can be used for the purpose of collecting research efficiently. It is a tool that many students are unfamiliar with, so it would entail a learning curve, but learning how to use the tool would be beneficial in its own right. I could show students how to sort a sheet by certain columns so they can search their research by research question or search by source, for example.

Regardless of the method I choose, students must be able to record the following while analyzing a source:

• information from the source
• which research question(s) the information applies to (this may be multiple)
• student reactions to or analysis of the information
• a citation for the source
• an annotation for the source

I also need to remind students to make it clear when they are recording a direct quote or when they are recording their own thoughts. An easy way to make this distinction is for students to place quotation marks around any direct quote and provide a page number (if applicable), as they will need this to cite the particular quote later on in the process.

I created a Google Slides document for students to keep track of image sources (Image Analysis Document), but Google Slides did not work well on the iPads. I will be recreating this in Google Docs (which works just fine on iPads), though the process will remain much the same.