Conversations II Lesson Plan

Due on Saturday at 8 p.m.

Question this lesson seeks to answer: How can we write about history for the general public in ways that are both accurate and interesting?

Learning objectives. By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

Locate a credible news story, pinterest pin, tweet or wordpress post about a contemporary (2015) issue about an issue related directly to the Mongols, the black death, the Renaissance, or Mansa Musa.
Locate a credible primary source that explains the importance of the issue that you’ve identified.
Accept an account invitation to wordpress.
Login to a wordpress account.
Write and post a blog entry on what issue you’ve identified and why it matters to a modern Minnesotan.

How to sign up for Word Press.

Check your Normandale email.
Accept the invitation to the wordpress blog History at Normandale.
Create your account as directed by the link.
After you’ve created your account and signed in, go to https://historyatnormandale.wordpress.com . Please give yourself the name you go by in this class for your username.
Click on the pencil icon with a + sign in the upper right hand corner of the page to write your post.

Write and tag your post.

Your post should be fewer than 500 words, including all quotations and citations for any images.

You do not need to post images to earn an A, but you do need to post links to your contemporary source and your historical primary source.

A composition window, very similar to Microsoft Word, will pop up and let you write you post. To add a link to your text, highlight the text and hit command and K (Mac) and CRTL and K (Windows) to make that word a link. Or you can click on the “Insert/edit link” button.(1)

Your post should do the following things:

Explain your two sources to a general audience.
Explain how your two sources relate to each other
Explain what issue the two sources raise for you.
Explain what is interesting about this issue as it relates to a contemporary Minnesotan.

Style guide: Your post should be conversational, much like you’d talk to a friend and a coffee shop. You don’t start conversations with “In this conversation I argue that …” or finish friendly chats with “In conclusion, points, a, b, and c all point to …” Nor do you speak in bullet points. You tell a story. See my example on the blog (all the way at the start of the blog) for conversational style.

Be sure to give your post a title.(2)

Please tag your post (tagging is adding a keyword) on the left hand side. Please add “1101 online” or “1101 face-to-face” as your tags.

Publish your post.

Once you’ve written, edited, titled, and tagged your post, click on “Publish” to add your post to the blog.

Note: I use this blog for multiple classes, you’ll see blog entries on industrialization from other students.

Time to complete

I expect it should take you about an hour to find two sources that work well together, another hour to figure out how to write an interesting post, and two hours to write, edit, and publish your post.

Don’t miss!

This is as close to traditional history paper as you get in this class. 500 words is about two pages, which is not easy to write well. Give yourself time. When students have succeeded on this assignment in the past is when they broke it into chunks and worked and though about it over an entire week. Students that dumped a couple of hastily found sources into a rambling “this is what I think about things on the internet” have struggled to earn decent grades.

Grading Criteria

Student:

Located a credible news story, pinterest pin, tweet or wordpress post about a contemporary (2016) issue about an issue related directly to the Mongols, the black death, the Renaissance, or Mansa Musa.
Located a credible primary source that explains the importance of the issue that you’ve identified.
Accepted an account invitation to wordpress.
Logged in to a wordpress account.
Wrote and posted a blog entry on what issue you’ve identified and why it matters to a modern Minnesotan.
Blog post used standard English capitalization, punctuation and usage.
Blog post demonstrated understanding of the historical topic covered.
Blog post relates a historical subject to contemporary life.