I recently had my students create and record some songs on the Prime Ministers of Canada. It was an interesting experience from which I learned at least as much as the kids did, though about different things. They learned a bit about each of Canada’s 22 Prime Ministers, how to use Audacity software and how to sing badly. So what did I learn?

1. For a project like this set very specific requirements.
   •  How many lines long should it be?
   • Should your song rhyme?
   • What will the teacher tolerate in terms of choice of melody for the song? (Can it be copyrighted? Can it be rock, country or a nursery rhyme? Two girls took the tune of a popular hymn, much to my surprise.)
   • Without specific requirements, it’s really hard to tell if the kids’ are reaching your objectives or not.
2. There’s a certain amount of chaos to be expected with a project like this
   • You can try to keep it quiet all you like, but when the kids need to find music they can remember, or when they have to sing it will be noisy, like it not. Get ready for it.
   • Noise can be good. You need to figure out the difference between good noise and bad and that’s a fine line with something like this.
3. As much as some kids do horrible songs, some do wonderful ones.
   • Most kids used the recording software to disguise their voices. I have quite a few kids who apparently sound like chipmunks.
   • Some kids picked well known songs and adapted them in creative ways. The most interesting song was probably “Why can’t we be Prime Ministers?”
   • Other students actually created their own music. It wasn’t brilliant, but it gave them an opportunity to express themselves they wouldn’t normally have.
4. Giving kids new opportunities is worth it.
   • Not all kids excel at essays, or projects, or PowerPoints, or drawings, or whatever you can dream up.
   • This project gave other kids an opportunity.

I’ve been busy the last few weeks and haven’t blogged much at all, much to my embarassment, but I’ve still been up to interesting things in class.

I’ve spent much of the past few hours on this prep day trying to dream up and put together an assignment for my Grade 9s for later this week or early next week. Though I teach them Social Studies, I still think knowing some basic history (which isn’t necessarily part of Social Studies) is pretty important.

I’d like it if all of my students would at least be able to recognize the names of all 22 Canadian prime ministers. To that end, I’m going to tell them a little bit about each, and then have them get together in small groups and write songs about the PMs. Music seems to be a great learning tool, so I figure that if I can get the kids to write a song summarizing all 22 of the prime ministers, then it will help them keep track of them.

We’re not looking for brilliance in the writing (though we have a strong music program at this school, so I may be surprised). All I really want is a bit of rhythm and rhyme sung to a recognizable tune whether that’s something complex and funky, or something simple like Frere Jacques. (I guess we can’t use Happy Birthday to You since that’s under copyright.)

I hope to record the songs using Audacity and then play them back for the class.  It should be an interesting experience. I hope it works.

Over the last few months, I’ve been exposed to a lot of people who, in one way or another, are using photos in their classroom. When I see other folks doing something cool, I start to wonder if I could do something similar myself.

I finally had an idea. My students have been looking at human rights issues for their Social Studies course, things like women’s suffrage, the Japanese Internment, and the Chinese Head Tax. What I did was challenge my students to reduce one of these issues to six key moments. Then they’re to act out these six key moments, and take pictures of them.

They have to select the best shot of each moment, cropping, brightening, and otherwise editing the photos as necessary. From there they have to log on to Big Huge Labs. (Big Huge Labs has an educator option where you register and then generate IDs for your students. They don’t need e-mail addresses to log on, and you get to see their projects as they work on them, if you choose.) Big Huge Labs’ Mosaic Maker lets the kids upload the photos and set them up in a nice 3 by 2 grid (which is just the right proportions to print off as a 4 by 6 print).

Once the kids save their mosaic on my flash drive (I keep a separate drive for just these sorts of occasions. I ‘m not getting my important school stuff accidentally ruined by one careless student), I’ll get them developped. Hopefully, we’ll have neat pictorial summaries of the particular human rights incident each group did brought together in a postcard like format.

This is the theory. In the next few days I’ll see how it turns out.

The shortlist of nominees for the Governor General’s Award for Excellence in Teaching History has been released. If you teach history it’s worth a quick look.  There’s some really cool projects in there.

Two of them in particular caught my eye. One was an adaptation of the Settlers of Catan and Risk to a new game that deals with colonization and settlement in Canada. Having bought the first English language version of Settlers in about 1995, this one really intrigues me.

The other was based around Father of Confederation puppet plays. (What could be better than puppet plays?) Apparently the kids make their own puppets as part of the assignment, and the ones shown on the Award announcement page look pretty cool.

It’s an inspiring collection of nominees. It’s nice to see how many cool ideas are being put to work to make Canadian history more exciting.

As a History teacher I’m a big fan of primary sources. There’s some really cool ones on the Net now including the Alberta Newspaper Collection and Manitobia’s Newspaper Collection of Manitoba journals.

Yesterday via my Twitter contacts, I came across a website of old Australian newspapers. Why, you ask, would someone who teaches Canadian history be interested in Australian papers? I have to admit, I had no good reason to be interested except that primary sources fascinate me. Then it occured to me that you might be able to measure how important an event is, in a big picture sort of way, by examening how much attention other people pay to it.

For example, was the execution of Louis Riel, so often mentioned in Western Canadian history courses, of interest to anyone else? It turns that in 1885 Australian newspapers did cover the event. The 1873 Canadian Pacific Railway Scandal rates a mention. It turns out that at least some events in Canada were of interest to people far across the world.

Primary sources from other countries can put your own countries events in perspective. They can get us out of our tiny fishbowl where our small world seems ever so important and give us a sense of scale. That is likely as important for the teacher as for the student.