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The History Lab™ is an online lesson template that reflects certain beliefs about teaching history: that student learning should focus as much on inquiry, reflection, interpretation and constructing hypotheses as on acquisition of predigested knowledge. It provides a framework to help teachers teach history through primary sources. In a History Lab, as in its analogue in the sciences, students deal directly with real materials (documents, artifacts and images on the one hand and chemicals, plants and bacteria on the other). They invest thought in the dynamics, qualities, quantities and relationships of these materials according to one or another methodology. They interpret or draw historical meaning from them. In this state, students are engaging in doing the activity -- history or science -- not merely reading about it or taking notes on a lecture. In the same way that science labs provide students an opportunity to study a topic in depth, so too history labs balance out the superficiality that often (and necessarily) characterizes history survey courses. If you are interested in learning more about The History Lab™, including how teachers at your school can add their own labs to the collection, please fill out the contact form. |
TIELab History Lab :: Technology in the Service of Learning
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