T. Mills Kelly, “Presenting: Capturing, Creating, and Writing the Past” (Chp. 4) in Teaching History in the Digital Age, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013
“When we ask students to create historical work in a digital environment, we create the possibility for greater collaboration between the students in the course and, depending upon the digital environment we choose”
I think that this quote speaks to the rest of the article because it lays out one of the most important parts about writing history and that is just that as a teacher you can give the students the work to write about history, and this is something I feel that a lot of teachers are afraid of doing especially when they are not teaching at a college level. As this quote talks about giving the students the opportunity to use their own digital environment or a digital environment that the teacher has provided gives the students the opportunity for the students to comprehend and understand the material better, but only if you give it a chance and do it the right way.
“I think that as educators and as historians we have an obligation to our students to teach them to use PowerPoint and/or other slideware programs to present information to a larger audience, largely because so many professional contexts expect this skill.”
This quote mentions the importance and obligation that teacher and historians have to their students to teach them how and why PowerPoints are used, and how they can use PowerPoint themselves. I think that this quote is a double-edged sword because yes 100 percent of students in college have used or will use PowerPoint at some point in their career but do we have an obligation to preach this and tell our students that this is the way? I think that this quote is something to think about because the author is not entirely wrong about how being taught PowerPoint is a skill that “many professional contexts expect.”
“Our teaching strategies need to change to help them explore new ways to combine what they do daily—create online content—with what we do. By showing them how the practices of the professional historian can be adapted to the digital realm, we help them see the process of online content creation as something more than just fun”
This quote comes from the very end of the article and the author has a lot to say about how we need to be teaching the students that come into our classrooms, and the autor mentions that by introducing our students to how historians think and how they write can really be beneficial to the course that you are teaching. The author specifically brings up introducing the students to more online media outlets and more online media content to show them how professional historians do their work and then write about it. At the end of this quote, he mentions that by doing this and introducing this to our students we can show them that creating online media can be more than “fun.” This quote really speaks to the times that we are in now where it is almost essential for history teachers to use media in the classroom.
