findingDulcinea

21st Century Activities for Women's History Month

This week, I scoured the Web for lesson plans and activities for Women's History Month. Few, if any, asked students to do Web research, demonstrate media literacy, synthesize multiple resources, communicate their findings in a manner that engages modern audiences, or share their project outside the walls of their school.

Below I suggest a few activities that will help students learn about inspiring women and seminal events in women's history, and also offer a learning experience that is relevant to the world in which they live and will one day seek to work. At the end of the post, we list our free resources to assist students in their work, and discuss an opportunity for students to publish their work.

Create a Timeline on Life.com

Life.com offers an extensive collection of photos from Life Magazine's legendary archives, as well as from Getty Images. It enables users to create and share a timeline of photos they select, and to write a caption for each photo. Here are four sample timelines about women in history. Caution: some of the photos on Life.com have adult themes, or may depict gore or violence.

Research Women's Firsts in 2010

History is not only what happened long ago; it is made every day. Two years ago, we partnered with The Women on the Web on "2008 Firsts for Women," a collection of women from all over the world who became the first of their gender to achieve something significant in 2008. One example was Brittany Cantazaro, who at the age of 19, had become New York Waterway’s first female ferry captain. Only a week after we published her profile, Brittany piloted the first ferry to rescue passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 after Captain Sullenberger landed it in the Hudson River. She exhibited wisdom beyond her years by cutting the engines of the ferry to avoid creating a wake that could have sent the plane's passengers plunging into the chilly water.

Have a team of students research and create "2010 Firsts for Women." In learning about women who are breaking barriers today, students will ponder why this is so, and gain a greater appreciation for those woman who broke barriers so many years ago.

A research tip: databases, which allow for more precise date targeting than any search engine, will be indispensible for identifying 2010's firsts for women.

Write a Series of Articles with a Common Theme, or Add to One of Ours

We've created a number of series of articles about women around a common theme:

• When we learned about Ada Lovelace, who created one of the world's first computer programs, we created a series of 6 Unsung Women who never got fair credit for their brilliant ideas, heroic deeds or extraordinary work, often due to prejudice, discrimination or the social mores of their time.
• Women who found their calling later in life often have the most unexpectedly inspiring stories. Last year, we again teamed with The Women on the Web to profile Late Bloomers, a handful of women who came into their own later in life, demonstrating the power of perseverance and the value of experience.
• In Women Who Dared, we recognized 15 women whose actions—in courtrooms, on buses, in polling booths and in planes—shattered the status quo. Through guts, grit and unyielding perseverance these women made a difference, raising our expectations for ourselves, our daughters, and our granddaughters.
• In Women of Honor: Writers Who Won’t Be Silenced, we honored five dissident writers whose lives and struggles enlighten and inspire us. One of the writers, Iryna Khalip, has since been arrested in Belarus and charged with criminal acts for speaking out against the government.

A class of students could develop a series of articles around their own theme, or write articles to add to one of our series.

On This Day Challenge

A student (or group of students) chooses a significant event from women's  history and uses the Web to research and gather information on the chosen event. Using critical thinking and analysis skills, the student then writes an article on the event, citing the Web sources. We provide specific instruction on how to write an On This Day article, and offer a dozen examples of events from women's history on this page.

Create Videos or Slideshows Instead of Articles

To create a video portrait of a woman or series of women, students could use a screen capture software product, such as Camtasia, to capture text, images and excerpts of videos of the women profiled, or a product such as Animoto to create a narrated video slideshow. Both products' websites offer extensive tutorials. In each case, students must conduct Web research, and then assemble the images, write a script, and create the end-product. The students' work could be displayed on a school website or their own blogs, or Teacher Tube or YouTube, and thus reach audiences across the globe.

Resources

To support students, we offer these resources:

• SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students,
• Ten Steps to Better Web Research,
• How to Avoid Plagiarism by Paraphrasing Correctly, and
• How to Synthesize Multiple Resources into an Article.

Opportunity for Students to Get Published

In the 21st century, everyone is a publisher. Students must learn to create work that is seen outside the walls of their school building. We'll happily publish on findingDulcinea any student work that you submit to us that links to excellent online resources and is well-written for the student's grade level. Alternatively, we'll publish a series of blog posts throughout the month that highlight and link to student projects on school or student Websites. Note also that the On This Day Challenge, discussed above, offers a more formal opportunity for students to get published and win prizes.

 

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In conjunction with findingEducation, we've launched the On This Day Challenge. We're asking students to write articles about historic events by conducting online research, with chances to win gift cards and cash and have their work published on findingDulcinea.

Click here to read everything teachers need to know about getting involved in the project. You'll find a section on motivating students to participate, advice for writing and researching an On This Day article, tips for evaluating Web sites, an FAQ and more.

Georgia O'Keeffe and Using the Web to Discover the Early Work of an Artist

Recently, while writing a profile of the great painter Georgia O'Keeffe, I came across a number of interesting details of her life and career. In doing research I learned that in order to have a visual timeline of her career and to keep the prices and demand for her work high, O'Keeffe kept or bought back more than half of all the 2000 or more paintings she created in her lifetime. She also appeared in art exhibitions for which she was not the artist, but the subject; her husband Alfred Stieglitz was an art gallery owner and photographer, and did a series of photographs featuring O'Keeffe (even a few nudes) during their marriage.

Although perhaps most surprising to me was that O'Keeffe did not always paint the forms for which we know her today. The stark white bones contrasting with the desert sky and the colorful over-sized insides of flowers were done in a style that O'Keeffe didn't adopt until she was nearly 40, but those paintings were so overwhelmingly popular that they have somewhat overshadowed her early work.

O'Keeffe's early work was of a more abstract nature. From about 1915 until the mid 1920s, O'Keeffe drew and painted images that expressed a view of the world in stark contrast to the almost photographic paintings of her later years. It was an early series of her charcoal on paper drawings (that were an abstract exploration of line and shape) that first caught the eye of then gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. The Georgia O'Keeffe museum notes that O'Keeffe was ahead of her art colleagues of the time with her interest in abstract work, just as her ultra realistic more famous paintings would show the world another innovative view later on.

One of the great advances in technology over the last decade is the increased availability of online multimedia, such as images and videos. This allows users to not just read about artists, but to experience their work. At the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Web site you can look at examples of her work from different eras in her career, including her abstract period. You would be hard-pressed to encounter many of these pieces in real life.

And if you'd like to visit the work of other well-known artists online, see our article about virtually visiting museums.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Musings on Math

For a long time, I loved math. In sixth grade I joined Mathletes, played the “whadyouget” game after every test, and my favorite part of my day—aside from recess—involved sitting in a group rolling a die and playing some obscure game where you added, subtracted and multiplied.As a freshman in high school, I helped with the measurements when we built what we hoped would be the world’s largest Icosahedron. We made a T-shirt of the blueprint. I wore it.

Today, however, I place myself squarely in the camp of women who’d say they aren’t good at math. Naturally, I was fascinated by a study saying that elementary girls scored lower on math tests after spending a school year with female teachers that were anxious about math.

Now, I know that a single case can’t negate a study and that’s not what I’m arguing. I don’t remember which teachers taught me math in elementary school or even if they were good teachers. It’s possible that they were nervous or uninspired. But the math teachers that I do remember were all women and they were, for the most part, bright, fun, confident women who LOVED math, and wanted to share that passion.

Still, at some point in high school, I started to believe that I wasn’t good at math. And while I don’t blame my teachers—though my freshman year teacher was by far the best—I do hold our society somewhat responsible. I know, blame society. That’s like blaming oxygen. But it’s true. Girls are taught that they excel at language and writing, while boys excel at math and science.  And even though statistics have begun to disprove this idea, the truth never came fast enough for some of us. At some point, like a lot of women I know, the thought that I would never be good at math wormed its way into some cranny in my brain, embedded itself, and then decomposed, bits of itself living on beneath the surface.

So, what happens when you don’t believe you’re good at something? You stop trying. And you’re never going to be good at something if you don’t practice at it. Ask Michael Jordan. Ask Norah Jones.

I chose another path. I became fascinated with language, enamored with books, and authors—all of it. That became my thing and I don’t regret it. But who says you can’t have more than one thing.  Teachers, encourage your students, all of them. If you're weak in a subject, practice. Get help. And don't ever let them think, it's because you're a woman.

Shannon Firth
Senior Writer and Audience Development Coordinator

Women Firsts in 2008

As most of us know, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton were big achievers in 2008. But there are many other women from around the world who set milestones this year. FindingDulcinea teamed up with WowOwoW, otherwise known as The Women on the Web, to profile 20 such women, including Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, New Hampshire's first female senator Jeanne Shaheen, Clinton, Palin, and 16 more. 

Visit WowOwoW's photo essay to see pictures and learn essential facts about the women.

Visit findingDulcinea's special section, 2008 Firsts for Women, to learn more about each of these women's lives and how they achieved their unique accomplishments.

Liz Colville

Senior Writer

Audience Development