6.0517 R: Teaching in High Schools (1/81)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 16 Feb 1993 12:43:31 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0517. Tuesday, 16 Feb 1993.
Date: 15 Feb 93 16:11:21 GMT
From: johnstonj@attmail.com
Subject: Re: 6.0504 Qs: Student Computers; Teaching; E-Mail Degrees
teaching American History in High Schools:
Here is a reprint of an article written by Mike Lamonico, a High School
Shakespeare teacher who is using WordCruncher and an electronic version
of the Riverside Shakespeare, also a History Microcomputer Review about
a product called The Constitution Papers. While these do not provide an
(a) ready made solution to the challenge of creating coursework from the
many disparate elements out there, it may help
Reply-To: "James Johnston - Vox (801) 756-1111, Fax (801) 756-0242"
EMAIL: If sending from BITNET attmail.com!johnstonj
If sending from Internet RFC 822: j_johnston@attmail.com
If sending from Internet UUCP: attmail.com!johnstonj
THE FOLLOWING THREE ARTICLES WERE WRITTEN BY MR. MICHAEL LAMONICO,
EXPLAINING HIS USE OF WORDCRUNCHER AND AN ELECTRONIC VERSION OF
HOUGHTON-MIFFLIN'S RIVERSIDE SHAKESPEARE.
1. TEACHING SHAKESPEARE WITH A COMPUTER, By MICHAEL LAMONICO
Teaching Shakespeare with a computer sounds like an oxymoron. The very idea
of high school students exploring the language of the foremost writer in
history on a high tech machine seems ludicrous. My colleagues scoffed at the
idea, thinking that the mechanization of this process would result in nothing
more than lists of meaningless data. In a way this was my first reaction when
I first heard of WordCruncher, a concordance and text retrieval program
combined with The Riverside Shakespeare's Complete Works. But after
convincing my school to order this program in 1988, my teaching has undergone
a radical change, and I have spread my discoveries to teachers everywhere.
[ ... text deleted by editor ... ]
THE CONSTITUTION PAPERS
A REVIEW REPRINTED FROM THE HISTORY MICROCOMPUTER REVIEW, FALL 1991
User-friendliness: Excellent
Level of use: High school and college.
Documentation: Extensive, includes a thirty-seven page manual in addition to
online help.
Overall effectiveness: Outstanding.
Brief Description: A series of over forty-one documents related to American
constitutional development selected by the staff of Johnston & Company,
Electronic Publishers.
Historians often recoil from the consistent student criticism that both high
school and college survey history courses are tedious and boring. While
certainly not all history teachers nor their courses are flat and lifeless,
one cannot ignore the common student perception that the study of history is
irrelevant and unescapably dull. Scientists capture the interests of their
students through well-devised experiments, social scientists emphasize the
impact of their disciplines on the modern world, but how can historians bring
the long "dead" past to life? One way to dramatically augment student
experience is to place historical documents in their hands. Students may have
little interest at first in reading in a survey text about the debates at the
Constitutional Convention but to present them with the actual words of John
Adams or Alexander Hamilton appears to open a new window into the past. By
gathering dozens of documents related to the development of American
constitutional government and placing them in electronic form, Johnston &
Company provide one way for American historians to dramatically enhance the
classroom experience of both high school and college students.
[ ... text deleted by editor ... ]
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