Meridian Middle School Computer Technologies Journal
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Virtual
History: Transposing Students to Another Time and Place
Cheryl Mason Bolick and
Scott M. Waring
Winter 2004 Issue
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Online
www.ncsu.edu/meridian/win2004/virtual/
Introduction
In a recent conversation with a class of eighth grade social studies students about life on the American home front during World War II, we were reminded of students’ inability to visualize and contextualize the past. We asked the students how they thought Americans on the home front get their information about the ongoing war in Europe, many of them responded with CNN Headline News or the Internet! It was beyond many of the students to grasp that American homes were not equipped with Internet connections during World War II and that many homes did not have televisions.
As middle school social studies teachers, we struggle daily to find ways to help our students conceptualize the past and think historically. Virtual history projects such as the one described in this article provide a powerful method of helping students engage in historical inquiry. Virtual history projects as defined for this instructional application are projects in which a student’s photograph is digitally placed within a historical photograph. Using digital images of students and of historical images to transport students back in time increase not only students’ excitement level but it also helps students visualize and personalize the past. Allowing students to “visit” another time and place can bring a new level of understanding of history for many students.
Virtual history projects require that students engage in an inquiry process that supports their understanding of the big ideas in history. When students engage in historical inquiry, they develop the schemas, or mental scaffolds that help clarify the major concepts in the field and identify when to apply those concepts. Developing these schemas helps students move from being a novice in the field to being an expert (Bransford et al., 1999). The virtual history project described in this article prompts students to go beyond the stark memorization of facts, and develop a conceptual understanding of the past. In this sense, students are better able to understand and apply historical concepts and begin to move from novice to expert comprehension.
Inquiry is the act of using prior knowledge, asking questions, identifying new information, and developing conclusions. “Placing” students back in time invites them to engage in an inquiry process that allows them to personalize and recreate an event or era in the past. Using the instructions below, teachers or students can manipulate digital images and be transported back into time. It is essential for teachers to ask questions in virtual history projects that require students to investigate and interpret the digital image. Teachers should prompt students to analyze the photograph by asking students questions such as: What is happening in this photograph? What are you doing in this photograph? What would you like to do next? From where you are in the photograph, describe what you hear. What are people talking about around you? What are you saying to the people around you? How do you feel at this time? What makes you feel this way?
The technology and learning concepts described in this article can be transferred to different content areas to further enhance student learning. For example, English teachers could transpose student images into different literature settings for writing activities. Imagine students placing themselves on a Mississippi raft with Tom Sawyer. Science teachers can use the virtual projects to place students in different environmental settings, the human body, or within different organisms such as an amoeba.
Inquiry-based activities are essential in all social studies classrooms, but even more so in middle school social studies classrooms. Virtual history projects are grounded in Erikson’s (1968) theory of development. That is, middle school students are in constant search to develop their ego-identity. By virtually placing themselves back into time or into other settings, students engage in the unfolding process that contributes to personal development. Adolescents develop based on the links between interrelated environments (Garbarino, 1985). That is, they make sense of themselves through a series of concentric circles. The adolescent is in the center of the circle, while family, peers, school and community fill the immediate surrounding circles. Events in history are often found in circles that are a great distance from the adolescent. By virtually placing students into historical events, through virtual history projects, teachers are able to help students bridge the gap from students’ immediate world to distant times and places.
The images below are taken from a lesson developed to help students learn about Japanese Internment Camps during World War II. Teaching such a topic can be a daunting task. In this lesson, students read Ken Mochizuki’s Baseball Saved Us , digital oral history clips, and poetry to begin unraveling the stories behind this tragic piece of American history. The lesson culminates with a virtual history activity. The students “place” themselves back into time using digital media tools and write a historical essay to help them contextualize life during this era. The entire lesson described here is also available online at: http://www.stpt.usf.edu/waring/japanese.
Creating Your Own Virtual History
To begin, you must have an historical photograph, a digital image of the student, and a computer with Adobe Photoshop or similar software such as Microsoft Photo Editor.
 Figure 1: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, [LC-USF3301-013293-M4 DLC] |
Although individuals using images for educational purposes may not need to ask for permission when using them in multimedia presentations and other educational projects, they should be sure to cite the source of the images used unless specifically requested not to do so. Many sites exist that provide public domain images for consumption for educational purposes. A helpful site for locating these resources is entitled Public Domain Pictures. One site created specifically to provide teachers with images for educational use is Pics4Learning. It is essential to carefully read any copyright notices posted on a web site providing digital images for further restrictions and instructions. As a general rule, all works available on the Internet are copyrighted which means that they may have restrictions upon their use. Several categories of material are not eligible for federal copyright protection. Among these include:
- Works that have not been fixed in a tangible form of expression (for example, choreographic works that have not been notated or recorded, or improvisational speeches or performances that have not been written or recorded)
- Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or content
- Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration.
- Works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship (for example: standard calendars, height and weight charts, tape measures and rulers, and lists or tables taken from public documents or other common sources) (U.S. Copyright Office, 2000)
For complete information on copyright regulations, visit the United States Copyright Office web site.
The historical photograph can either come from scanning an photograph you took (Figure 1) or by searching the Internet. Many search engines, such as AltaVista (www.altavista.com) have a check-off on their search page that will let you choose to only search for images. If you use a photograph from the Internet, make sure that you are using an image that does not have copyright restrictions that forbid its use in this manner. Most Internet sites that provide digital images include a disclaimer or copyright restrictions for the use of items found within their site(See sidebar, Copyright Issues for information on appropriately utilizing pictures found over the Internet).
Once an acceptable image is found, it is important to save the image at the highest resolution available in order to have greater clarity and more options for its use. The most common error performed by people searching for graphics on the Internet is that they save the digital file from the “thumbnail” sized image on a web site. Many times when the thumbnail image is saved directly, it has a smaller file size and in turn has a poorer quality than a larger option that might be available on the same web site. It is essential to click upon the thumbnail image whenever possible to open a larger and higher quality image before saving. Another important key to saving higher quality images is that when given the option for the type of file for which the image will be saved, it is best to save it as a jpeg, a file that has a name that ends in .jpg or .jpeg. Jpegs often will preserve the quality of the image better than other file types (i.e. bitmaps or gifs).
You can get the image of the student in several ways, but the three easiest ways are to take a digital picture of him/her with a digital camera, to take a picture with a regular camera and have the film developed on a disk, or to take a photograph of the student that has already been developed and scan it into the computer by using a scanner (Figure 2).
Once you have digital copies of both the historical artifact and the photograph of the subject to be inserted, you should mentally map out how the final product will look (Figure 3). You must think it through carefully, as it will make the process much easier once you sit down at the computer to alter the historical artifact.
