If you teach high school social studies just about anywhere, working with primary source documents is likely a central feature to your course. This has been a major shift in teaching social studies in the past thirty years and it is a good one!
Retired now, I taught high school social studies for 18 of my 35 years on the job. Over that time, I developed a large collection of document-based tasks and training lessons to teach students to use them properly to reconstruct the likely past.
Most of my document-based tasks followed the structure of the New York State Regents Examinations for social studies: the enduring issue essay and constructed-response question (CRQ) in grades nine and ten and the short essay and civic literacy essay in US History grade 11. But incorporating one lengthy primary source text in each unit was also important to me and having students respond in a standard essay format was key for my units. I invite the reader to read more about using extended primary source tasks here.
In the DBQ shop, you will find document-based tasks that I edited and created. They are arranged by category. The sources are cited and this is especially important because students are supposed to consider the sources carefully. If you are interested in lessons for teaching students about primary sources, you may find something you like in the PowerPoint shop!
You need to be a subscriber to make purchases from the Innovation shops. Download links for purchased items are stored in your dashboard. The resources are all in PDF format. Please review the terms and conditions.
This year, I am enjoying teaching French remotely, both one-on-one and in whole group configurations. In a whole group situation, encouraging engagement is important and synchronous chat is a great way to do this.
Most video conferencing apps like Zoom and Teams have chat features. But I don’t like using this for instruction for a variety of reasons. I need something that provides structured synchronous remote conversations in an environment that I can moderate, monitor, and record for possible later assessment. The Innovation synchronous chat is like a chat breakout room for education. Read more about the theoretical underpinnings of this app.
Permit me to describe how to use this handy educational app.
Step 1: Create a New Chat
First, the instructor creates a new chat. Select the course in which playlist you wish to post the chat. Click any of the green plus-sign buttons to add a new task. From the top, select “Chats”.
Now you can set up your new chat with a title and optional accessories. “Accessories” are additional elements that your assignment may need, such as a PDF document, a video, or just a simple description.
When you create the task, it places the link in the course playlist just like any other task. It will be listed as a “forum” type task and, while it can be viewed in form format, it will be a chat. Read more here about asynchronous discussion forums. When you are ready to use it, click on the link to start the host teacher session.
The Host Controls
Your teacher’s host controls are on the right. “Live Link” creates a URL that you can send to students so they can join the session. You can, for example, post this in the video conferencing app chat or in an email.
Another way students can join is by logging in to their Innovation dashboard, navigating to the course where the link is posted, and clicking on the link to the chat. Students cannot use the chat session if there is no teacher host. Teachers can hide links in the playlist for a course as needed.
There must be at least two students for the app to proceed.
My preference is to start up the chat and then copy the live link URL and paste it into the video conferencing chat so students can join easily without searching for a link.
As students join, their names appear in the participants list on the lower right.
Conducting a Chat
Once your students have joined, click on the “Assign Partners” button control. This will randomly and anonymously assign students to a chat partner (if there is an odd number of students, one group of 3 is created).
Now that partners have been assigned, you will see each team listed in the column to the right. Teams are nicknamed by world cities. You can click on these any time to view the current chat. You can share this screen so you can conduct instruction while chats are going on and share with the class anonymously what students are chatting about.
The chats need to be started. You can optionally set a timer to end the sessions after a certain number of minutes.
Students now have full functionality to conduct their assigned chat.
When the Session is Completed
Once the session is completed or is to be paused, you click the Disable Chat button. Now you can move to Debriefing Mode if you wish to display a shared screen with each teams chats and offer advice and commentary or discussion.
Other Features
Scoring Mode
Scoring mode is for the teacher. In scoring mode, you can assess students’ participation using a built-in rubric. Just click the team name to view the chat and the form for grading the chat. The rubric’s dimensions are quality, etiquette, appropriateness, and form. You can save the score. You can also just score it manually.
You may also find it useful to view the chat in a forum format. This is good for lengthier discussions with longer post sizes. You can grade the work here as well.
Viewing in forum mode lets you grade it based on other installed rubrics such as those for online discussion.
What if a student joins after we have started?
Students who join after the chat has been are automatically assigned to one of the other groups.
What if we want to resume the chats?
If the teacher enables chat again after a stop, the teams are the same and the chat picks up where it left off.
This app empowers teachers to foster meaningful interactions in a structured, remote environment while maintaining control and oversight. Its flexibility allows for dynamic group work, individual assessment, and real-time engagement—all tailored to the needs of modern educators and learners. By integrating tools like these, educators can enhance the depth and quality of online instruction, creating opportunities for collaboration that rival, and often surpass, traditional classroom experiences.
When I took up my first full-time job teaching at a small, rural school in 1991, I inherited a vast trove of teaching materials from the former instructor. A lot of it I pitched (some was dated from the 60s!) but some I kept and was grateful to have.
So, I’m retired. But what about all my stuff? Well, dear web-site-visitor, here is my stuff! I would like to invite you into my virtual classroom archives, kind of like a virtual garage sale. There are two shops here I hope you will browse to find many valuable purchases: one features online learning activities from my recent and current online courses (I continue to teach part-time in retirement) and the other shop features my old PowerPoint slide shows. Some of them date back 25 years, if you can believe it!
You need to be a subscriber to buy from either shop. The annual fee to subscribe to Innovation is extremely reasonable! Your purchases are saved to your account, your virtual classroom, in a course your students cannot see that is called “Purchases and Imports”.
Log in and shop across my recent and current courses for teaching world history, US history, and French levels I through AP French and even French V!
As you browse, you can preview items you might like. Click for pricing details to see what the activity contains (questions, images, audio, etc.). Checkout when you are ready and when you’re entering credit card data, don’t forget to enter a coupon or promo code you may have come across!
Upon transaction completion, the activities are copied from my class to yours in Innovation. You will find them in a class called Purchases and Imports.
Log in to make purchases here too. These are downloads of PPTX files of all different sizes and on many different themes. I have taught French all levels, social studies middle and high school, and even computer science courses. At this writing, the shop already has over 300 PowerPoints and I have not even uploaded them all yet!
Once your purchase is complete, you will get links to download each file you purchased. The links also are posted to your own virtual classroom here at Innovation, that class called Purchases and Imports.
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Purchasing and Downloading
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TestDrive is a feature of Innovation that allows teachers to provide content to anonymous users via passcodes. There are some limitations to using passcodes. Student data is not recorded or saved, teachers cannot edit tasks or monitor student access. We’d like to encourage teachers to become subscribers! As such, teachers can use the passcodes to import the task into their own account and then have full access to all Innovation features.
Innovation Assessments LLC provides access to teacher-generated content through unique passcodes. Each passcode allows students to access specific learning applications within the TestDrive platform. Teachers who purchase or are granted passcodes may share them solely with their students for completing designated online tasks in TestDrive. Passcodes do not require student registration or login.
By using a passcode as described above, you acknowledge and agree to the following:
Restricted Sharing: Passcodes are intended only for students in the teacher’s class or assigned group. Passcodes may not be shared outside this scope.
Third-Party Content: Embedded content, such as YouTube videos, may not be owned or controlled by Innovation Assessments LLC and could become inaccessible without notice.
Duration of Access: Passcodes will generally remain functional indefinitely, allowing access to activities as long as they are part of the active curriculum. However, Innovation Assessments LLC reserves the right to deactivate or discontinue passcodes in the event of significant business changes or content restructuring. Passcodes will remain active until such a time unless otherwise stated.
Content Revisions: Activities accessed through passcodes may be revised, edited, or updated at any time without notice to improve content quality, adapt to curriculum changes, or meet technical requirements.
One of my favorite lessons teaching any time period of social studies has always been working with extended length primary sources.
Students’ initial difficulty completing these tasks usually stemmed from habits I like to help them break. The first bad habit was to copy sections of the source text verbatim instead of paraphrasing. Another was the expectation that all the answers were in the source text. An important, if not vital, competency in studying primary sources is to be aware of the outside knowledge and possible biases that the reader them-self brings to the source. This task calls on students to bring prior knowledge to direct awareness.
My primary source analysis task is a short essay. The process is the same for every source no matter the time period or even the grade level. Students address the source type, purpose, and audience. They provide relevant historical context from their own knowledge. They summarize the source. They address reliability factors. For middle schoolers, these “essays” are really more like short compositions. My high schoolers came to compose more extended length essays. Here’s one you can have for nothing:
Up to my retirement, I was teaching in a small, rural K-12 school where I had students for three or even four years. This was a great benefit for so many reasons, one of which was they became “skilled at the skills”. I integrated a lot of writing and reading in my courses.
The Important is Not Always in the Text Itself
Most elementary level reading comprehension tasks call on students to locate an answer in the text to prove they understand. Working with primary sources means understanding what was going on in the historical period that produced the document. Getting students to grasp this takes patience and perseverance. This task asks students to deduce how the audience was expected to react to the source, who the intended audience was, what was going on historically at the time, and factors affecting reliability of the source. None of this is in the document explicitly itself.
A Great Way to Teach Critical Thinking and Deduction
I cannot recommend this assignment strongly enough for my fellow social studies teachers out there. I assigned this right after I completed the content delivery in a unit. It lent itself to long-term retention of the historical content because students needed to apply this newly acquired knowledge to the text. It promotes reading comprehension. It stimulates discussion in class. Often, a student would have a question about the source or how to answer questions of bias and audience and reliability. It would make a great opportunity to pause and have a discussion about these things. These extended length primary sources offer much more to the learning process that the short 200-word snippets we find in textbooks and on state tests (think document-based essays and constructed-response tasks).
The Essay Prompt Assignment may be a Hard Sell to Teachers
I have not been very successful in promoting this method to many others. Very few of the essay versions sell at our TeachersPayTeachers store. I think I understand why. It takes time and consistency to teach reliability factors to students. Grading a hundred short essays every unit of study is a daunting proposition in light of everything else we have to do. More than one transfer student remarked that my social studies courses had a lot of writing. None regretted it. More than one said they learned to write in my class.
But I get it! So, I am developing an automated multiple-choice version of these assignments. Mind you, reader, I feel that doing this as a composition is a better practice, but I can also see how doing a multiple-choice version of this task can be very instructive. I invite you to download this free resource to try it out.
First of all, if you want to have your students write the essay version of this assignment, each prompt includes the same organizer to guide their writing.
I have carefully documented where I got the source using an easy-to-understand source citation system that I borrowed from genealogists. This citation is presented first and should prompt the student to consider factors affecting reliability.
The multiple-choice version is auto-corrected. You get a passcode that students use to access the online task at the Innovation website. Learn more about our passcodes from this short video:
The questions are categorized under “Observations” whose categories are intended audience, historical context, source summary, and reliability factors. The resource includes a text version of the questions in case you don’t feel the online auto-corrected version is best.
If you’ve purchased one of our products on TeachersPayTeachers, you may have received passcodes for online activities. These passcodes allow your students to access and complete exercises on our website, where their scores will be displayed. But there’s more you can do with these passcodes, especially if you’re a subscriber to our Innovation platform. Here’s how you can maximize their potential.
Distribute to Students: Give the passcode to your students. They will enter it on the TestDrive page of the Innovation website to access the exercise. The system will display their scores upon completion.
Import into Your Dashboard:
Log into Your Dashboard: Navigate to the upper right-hand corner of the Innovation website.
Enter the Passcode: Paste the code into the provided field. Ensure you’ve copied it correctly.
Import the Activity: Click “Import,” select the class for the activity, and confirm. The system will notify you of a successful import.
Organize Your Activities: The new activity will appear at the top of your list. You can rearrange it by using the “Actions” > “Reorder” button and drag and drop it as needed.
Benefits of Importing Activities
Enhanced Monitoring: By importing activities into your Innovation account, you can track student progress more effectively. You’ll see who completed what, when, and how long they spent on each task.
Customization Options:
Edit Questions: Tailor the questions to better suit your teaching style or add cue points for enhanced engagement.
Add Resources: Upload PDFs, audio files, or other materials to create a richer learning experience.
Create New Questions: Use our question bank to generate new activities. The imported questions are saved in your database, categorized for easy access.
Creating Tests and Tutors
Instant Tests: Use the question bank to quickly assemble multiple-choice tests. Select the desired questions, and voilà – you have a ready-to-go test.
Tutoring Features: Set up practice sessions so students can rehearse before tackling the main exercise. This helps reinforce learning and builds confidence.
By subscribing to our Innovation platform, you gain these powerful tools to enhance your teaching experience. Import your activities, monitor student engagement, and customize content to meet your needs. We hope you’ll join us and unlock the full potential of your teaching resources.
Upon retiring from full-time public school teaching in 2023, I took part-time working teaching French remotely. Teaching via video conferencing turns out to be a terrific method and a very satisfying work!
Being also a web developer for a platform designed for remote teaching and in-class 1:1 designs, I was inspired by this work to begin developing a set of applications specifically for teaching world languages remotely.
I always loved improv and when teaching social studies or French in my career, my students and I enjoyed role play as a learning tool that was fun and meaningful. My practice was to incorporate many exercises to develop conversational proficiency using improv or semi-improvised “scaffold” dialogues.
The improv app at Innovation is now well developed. This app is available to subscribers only right now from the Language Console of the dashboard.
The teacher shares the screen in a remote teaching situation (or in-person, displays the screen in class). The first thing is to select the proficiency level. I use the CEFR descriptors.
A notice appears in red in the center advising students not to use AI while participating. This was sometimes an issue for me with some remote students, who quickly consulted Google translate instead of improvising their own contributions to our conversation. Teachers can remove this notice by clicking in.
Once the difficulty level is chosen, the teacher can select from the available conversation themes. These correspond to typical topics taught in world language classes that employ thematic units as the method. The reader will notice in the graphic that a scorecard appears on the right. The scoring method is that used in speaking tasks on New York State world language assessments and instructions are available at the click of a button.
Once the teacher has selected the theme, a set of possible dialogues appears.
Upon selecting the prompt, the conversation can begin. As the dialogue proceeds, the teacher can track the attempts and utterances in the scorecard on the right. They can award 2 points for utterances which are comprehensible, appropriate, and make no surprising errors for level. the can award 1 point for utterances that are not quite right for that student’s expected proficiency. The app automatically calculates the grade.
Now what I like to do is to use the large textarea in the center to provide useful words or phrases that the student asked for or needed during the dialogue.
List the expressions with their meaning separated by an equal sign. Here’s why: the Innovation flashcards app has been integrated so that we can study the phrases! Scroll down just a wee bit and you will find a small button called “Cards”. This will extract those phrases and arrange them into flash cards for study!
My practice is then to give students a copy of that list via email or in their lesson notes. They can themselves use Innovation’s Quick Flashcards app to generate their own drills for later.
The development of the improv app at Innovation has been a particularly exciting work. By incorporating elements of improvisation and conversation scaffolding, I’ve aimed to make language learning both engaging and effective for students in remote teaching contexts as well as for in-person learning. The app’s integration with other features such as proficiency level selection, themed dialogues, and real-time scoring ensures a comprehensive learning experience.
I found in that trove of activities a reading comprehension task that I had forgotten about: the ordered list or chronology. After reading the text and doing the usual vocabulary and comprehension kinds of tasks, I presented students a set of sentences where the events were out of order. On the worksheet, they were to number them in correct order according to the text. This was a great way to reinforce not only the events in the story, but more importantly the vocabulary and reading skills I was working to support.
I am currently teaching French online and one of my classes has chosen this graphic novel for a unit of study. Since I am teaching remotely, I want digital 21st century learning spaces instead of PDF worksheets. And so out of necessity was born this new app at Innovation, the ordered list.
The ordered list is simple: students either drag and drop or use the buttons to arrange the text boxes in order. They can check their progress as they go and submit a score when done. I can see how this would have been very useful when I was teaching history!
This needed to be easy for the teacher to create. It’s a snap: the teacher merely pastes in the ordered list and clicks a button to generate the activity.
As added features, one can attach a PDF document, an audio file, and/or embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo. The student could be prompted to order the text boxes based on these sources.
The usual 21st century learning spaces features are integrated. Teachers will see in the audit when their students access the task and how long they spend on it. The proctor monitors access to the page and student attention. It’s easy to view the scores of grades are taken and to apply standardized scoring or any of the other Innovation features and functions.
Try it for yourself! Use this passcode to access a chronology task for the American Revolution at the Innovation TestDrive: 397Q-NMXL-A15625Z-9-JON
Using translation with beginner language students is fraught with controversy. When I was in elementary school, the contemporary teaching methods for modern languages were phasing out from “grammar-translation” toward more communicative approaches. Translation came to be seen as antiquated, impractical, unnatural.
It cannot be denied that some criticism of translation, especially for beginners, is valid. I cannot help reflect on some brilliant students I have had over the years who, by French III, had become held back by their insistence on mentally translating everything before they wrote or spoke. Their focus on the rules, the words, the syntax, the burden of feeling like they must not err, all conspired to leave them tongue-tied and frozen whenever they were called upon to improvise speech or writing.
Nonetheless, I find in my experience that there is a place for translation in novice language lessons. Students should learn the ways that the target language differs from their own so that they gradually learn to avoid applying the syntactical patterns of their own language. The also need to be able to discern morphological differences in the target language that may be slight to their eyes but which meaning can vary significantly. Finally, it is a good way for novices to learn the longer, whole functional phrases that are a part of the earliest stages of learning before grammar has been taught to let them synthesize their own utterances.
Barriers to Using Translation to Teach Novices
Limited vocabulary is the first barrier to using translation to teach novices. In the textbooks at the start of the 20th century, each chapter had a very controlled vocabulary that was repeated in reading and translation exercises. Many of us no longer teach that way. I teach through theme units. The unit has a lot of vocabulary but the higher order language work is not limited to that as a controlled vocabulary list. Narratives and authentic texts, even listening practices, while selected with difficulty in mind, do in fact include words and structures the student may not yet have been taught. The advantages of this approach are well known and it is common practice now. Among other things, the student learns the very functional skill of deriving meaning from context, selectively ignoring incomprehensible utterances in favor of the meaningful, and perhaps learning new words from context.
The second barrier to teaching with translation is, naturally, grammar. Good grammar exercises that use translation have to be very controlled to account for irregulars and inconsistencies that most language boast of. At the very early stages, novices has so little grammar under their belt that translation may not prove worthwhile. Or, the cognitive load of balancing all the rules will render the exercise useless for its purpose.
Here is What I Needed
I needed an app that would auto-correct and let students try again when they made errors. I needed limited vocabulary and limited grammatical competence to be largely irrelevant. I needed an interactive activity where students manage the syntax and recognize correct forms. I call the new app “scramblation”. It is a drag-and-drop interface where students assemble an utterance in the target language from a prompt that is either in text form or audio clip.
Translation plays a pivotal role in the process of studying a foreign language, serving as a valuable tool for language learners to bridge the gap between their native tongue and the target language. It offers learners a nuanced understanding of linguistic structures, idiomatic expressions, and cultural nuances, thereby facilitating a more profound comprehension of the language’s intricacies. Translating texts from the target language to one’s native language and vice versa enhances vocabulary acquisition, grammar proficiency, and overall language competence. It enables learners to decipher the meaning behind words and phrases, fostering a deeper connection to the cultural context embedded within the language. Moreover, translation exercises encourage critical thinking and analytical skills, as learners must carefully consider the nuances of each word and construct coherent and contextually accurate sentences.
A New App
Instructors can generate a new scramblation from the playlist of their course in Innovation. They enter a prompt, the correct answer, and some extra words. I link to use the extra words to enter un-conjugated verbs or words an English speaker might put in that would not go in the target language.
The prompt can be an audio clip (in which case the text prompt is hidden) and can include an image.
Students can see the task in their playlist and access to a scramblation can be made possible from a link in the lesson plan app or an external link that instructors can send to students.
The app itself is simple: first, students should remove any extra words by clicking the small red “x” in the word’s box. Next, the student drags and drops the words into the right order. They save their answer, check it, and the algorithmic AI will tell them how close they are.
Like all of the apps at Innovation, the scramblation has a proctor activated that tracks student activity on the page, including when they leave the page and how long they were working.
The importance of interactive web applications in the realm of remote teaching cannot be overstated. Interactive web applications emerge as powerful catalysts for student engagement, collaboration, and personalized learning experiences. The ability to seamlessly integrate multimedia content, real-time communication, and interactive assessments not only enhances the effectiveness of teaching but also empowers educators to adapt their pedagogical approaches to the diverse needs of their students.
