Grant: NYSE Financial Future Challenge

The NYSE Financial Future Challenge asks kids to create a new product/idea or process that will excite and educate friends and classmates about investing and the financial marketplace. Ideas can be activities, games, books, websites, videos, etc. that illuminate the fundamentals of the stock market and financial literacy. Maximum award: $2,500. Eligibility: kids ages 6-19. Deadline: September 30, 2009.

Image courtesy of Time Magazine.

National Humanities Center Online Courses

The following is a list of live, online professional development opportunities in U.S. History and American Literature from the National Humanities Center. They sound great, and they're only $35!!

Thurs., Oct. 8: The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America
Tues., Oct. 13: Why Some New World Colonies Succeeded and Others Failed
Tues., Oct. 20: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Tues., Oct. 27: Civil War Art
Wed., Oct. 28: The Cult of Domesticity
Tues., Nov. 10: Emancipation
Thurs., Nov. 12: The Ashcan School
Thurs., Nov. 19: In Search of the Civil Rights Movement

Photo courtesy of the Friends of the Vermont State House

Faked Photographs: Look, and Then Look Again

The following article appeared in the Sunday, August 23, 2009 edition of the New York Times:

What a marvel the first photographic images must have been to their early-19th-century viewers — the crisp, unassailable reality of scenes and events, unfiltered by an artist’s paintbrush or point of view.

And what an opportunity for manipulation. It didn’t take long for schemers to discover that with a little skill and imagination, photographic realism could be used to create manufactured realities. “The very nature of photography was to record events,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and a detective of photographic fakery. “You’d think there would have been a grace period of respect for this new technology.”

But the tampering began almost immediately: affixing Lincoln's head to another politician’s more regally posed body; re-arranging the grim detritus of Civil War battlefields to be better composed for the camera; erasing political enemies.

Sorting icons of truth from icons of propaganda is often a thorny business that can take decades to resolve, and that’s if it gets resolved. The long-argued case of Robert Capa's shocking “Falling Soldier” of 1936, taken during the Spanish Civil War, has recently flared again. Is this a loyalist soldier in his fatal moment, or is it staged? A Spanish researcher has scrutinized the terrain in the photo’s background and determined that it is not an area near Cerro Muriano, as Capa’s biographer had said, but another spot, about 35 miles away. Whether this forces the conclusion that the scene was acted out is being debated with fresh vigor. (Critics have raised doubts about the photo since the 1970s.)

Questions dogged Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima from the start — the result of a conversation overheard and misunderstood, according to Hal Buell, who wrote a book about the image.

Click here to read the rest of the article and to see the slide show "A Brief History of Photo Fakery."

Teaching About September 11th

What are you doing in your classroom to commemmorate the 8th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon? Or are you doing anything at all? Please feel free to use this blog to share your thoughts, ideas, and resources with the rest of us.

If you do teach about September 11th, below are just a few resources of the many available.

The National September 11th Memorial and Museum's web site education section offers the following:

• A History section with a webcast, timeline, and ongoing feature articles
• A discussion guide and activities
• 9/11: Stories of Survival and Loss - a short film featuring first-hand accounts of survivors, victims' familiy members, and first responders
• The Spirit of Volunteerism: 9/11 and Beyond - a short film highlighting the outpouring of compassion and volunteerism in the aftermath of September 11
• "History in the Making," a teaching guide with take-home pages
• A Scholastic Kid Reporter article from a kid who was there

NCSS also has a multi-resource page about September 11th:

• Dear Teacher’: Letters on the Eve of the Japanese American Imprisonment
• We are Living History: Reflections of a New York City Social Studies Teacher
• The Trauma of Terrorism: Helping Children Cope
• At Risk of Prejudice: Teaching Tolerance about Muslim Americans
• At Risk of Prejudice: The Arab American Community
• Debating War and Peace in Washington Square Park
• Media Literacy Skills: Interpreting TragedyFollowing a Tragic Event: A Necessary Challenge for Civic Educators
• In War, Is Law Silent? Security and Freedom After September 11
• Teaching about Terrorism, Islam, and Tolerance with the Internet
• Civil War in Afghanistan
• Letters to the Editor
• 2001 NCSS Presidential Address
• The Women of Afghanistan
• Restoring the Rights of Afghan Women: An Interview with Nasrine Abou-Bakre Gross
• A Thoughtful Patriotism
• Afghanistan In Focus
• My Name is Osama
• We Are Strong/We Are Vulnerable
• Both Sides of the Classroom Door: After 9-11, the Many Facets of Teaching
• Growing Up in the Aftermath of Terrorism
• World Religions and Personal Tolerance
• The Aftereffects of September 11 - What the Polls Tell Us

And finally, The September 11th Education Trust has just published a national, interdisciplinary curriculum for purchase.

Lake Champlain History Comes Alive! Workshop

For many years, Flynn teaching artists have collaborated with teachers through its signature Words Come Alive! program to develop techniques in drama and movement to strengthen student comprehension of various curricular topics. In this full-day workshop, participants will have the opportunity to experience these techniques as they are applied to primary sources and history texts of Lake Champlain, in support of the commemoration of Samuel de Champlain’s naming of the lake 400 years ago. These tried-and-true techniques deepen students’ personal connections with history and allow them to view the past from multiple perspectives of ethnicity, gender and loyalties. As a middle school student exclaimed, “It’s like learning history and being a part of history all at the same time.” Participants will receive the 2nd edition of the Words Come Alive! toolkit.

Date: Friday, September 25, 2009 9 am-3 pm

Location: Flynn Center

Leaders: Joan Robinson and Lida Winfield

Cost: Payable by check to Flynn Center on 9/25/

$25 CVEDC Members $35 Non-CVEDC Members

To register: http://cvedc.champlain.edu/

Registration deadline: 9/18/09

PBS Teacher Activity Packs

PBS has some great classroom resources, and now they've organized them by larger themes - called Teacher Activity Packs - in social studies, such as:

• American Identity
• Indigenous Cultures
• Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders
• Patriotism
• China
• Politics and Art
• Citizenship
• Religious Diversity in America
• Constitutional Controversies (NOTE: Constitution Day is September 17th)
• Studying Genocide
• Crime and Justice
• The Presidency
• Everyone's Business
• Unsung Heroes in African American History
• Global Population
• Women's Rights Then and Now
• Immigration
• World Religions
• In the News

International Travel Grant for U.S. Teachers

Here is a travel grant opportunity, the Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program (TEA) reciprocal US teacher exchange, provided by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), US Department of State and implemented by IREX.

The grant provides for visa support, round-trip domestic airfare, lodging and meals to attend the TEA U.S. Conference, round-trip airfare from the U.S. to the assigned country, emergency medical evacuation plan, and lodging and a daily stipend in host country for a two week exchange to one of 27 countries. 80 awards will be made.

During the exchange, US teachers will work with their international hosts to conduct professional development workshops for the educational community and co-teach in their area of expertise. It is also a wonderful way to internationalize the US teacher's classroom by creating long-lasting ties to students and teachers on the other side of the globe.

For more information, please see our program flyer at http://eepurl.com/clfC. The program flyer website makes it easy for you to share the flyer via e-mail or through social networking tools. I have also attached a PDF version of the flyer for distribution. Applications are available at the TEA website, http://www.irex.org/programs/tea/tea_us.asp.