Summer at Museums: Haifa Train Museum.

Visiting museums is one of the highly recommended activities for summer breaks.
Museums are both entertaining and edifying, and kids like to explore every corner of it.

Train Museum in Haifa presents history of trains in Israel. It is full of primary sources.

This cattle car made me shiver when I pictured Jewish people being forced away from their homes and transported by freight trains in Europe after1933.














We discovered two walls of train tickets and ID cards of people working in the Israeli train system in all times.

The notice of the right that warns citizens not to take fruit and vegetable south of Zichron Yaakov lead us to a mini puzzle solving about the place of our home town. 

Research Projects versus Report Papers.

Case Study:

In class, students work on a research project. They use information from multiple sources, take notes and cite materials following the MLA format. They turn their projects to the teacher... and the teacher is disappointed. Research papers look like encyclopedia articles or book reports. 

What is the problem?

Suggestions: 

Before the project is long underway, students examine several research papers. Their attention is drawn to the details that make research papers not a mere review of information found on a topic. A research paper is the result of an intense work and interaction with primary and secondary sources followed by an evaluation of these materials. A research paper is a composition in which students express their personal ideas and points of view and support them by information found in reliable sources.

In addition to presenting a summary of arguments of other authors on the topic (Report), students analyze, examine, discover and revise facts, theories and applications (Research) through a series of steps (Research Process) in order to develop their own ideas and express them in a form of a product. 




You may decide to "apply" knowledge and focus on creating a product. Then, your learning will grow along making and presenting it to the audience.

Keywords:

Primary Sources - are information "collected directly from the real world". They include interviews, surveys, observations, analysis and ethnographic research (Purdue OWL).

Secondary Sources as opposed to primary sources are articles, books or websites that interpret primary sources. These sources are "works of synthesis and interpretation based upon primary sources and the work of other authors" (Teachinghistory.org).

Research – is a diligent and systematic inquiry or investigation into a subject in order to discover or revise facts, theories, applications, etc. Synonyms: investigation, analysis, fact-finding, examination, scrutiny (Webster).

Report - is a review of what others have written about a topic, given a spoken or written account of something that one has observed, heard, done, or investigated, presenting a  summary of arguments of other authors on the topic. Synonyms: describe, communicate, publish, publicize.

Project - is an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim (Oxford Dictionaries Online)

Research paper reviews the materials written about a topic, draws one’s own conclusions and argues his/her point.

Research Process – is a series of steps, which make up research from the development of an idea to the completed research paper.

Project-Based Learning: collaboration with Librarian

Just on time I received a link to Edutopia on Project-Based Learning approach to teaching!
Students are engaged in exploration of real world problems and investigation of the subject much deeper than they are when reading textbooks and listening to lectures. 

A couple of weeks ago High School students presented their final projects at their Ancient History class. Both their Social Studies teacher and the librarian were satisfied with the result of the work. For the first time we worked as a teacher/librarian team on this project: we planned the steps of the research and agreed on the final product by putting a rubric.

The theme was to choose one of the groups of people who are present in different parts of the world and still have a life style like people during the Stone Age. The goal of the project was to evaluate the way of this group living and define the stage of their development supporting it with examples and explanations. Students started their work with filling in the chart with characteristics of the tribe and the development stages of the Stone Age. We worked on the chart together prior the research session. We also were very clear with our expectations from the class in the library: students had to submit their outlines to the unit in Moodle.

Students had a block to work in the library and to have both of us assisting them in finding proper resources. Without realizing that they were learning new skills, students browsed the library catalog and located books on shelves; they followed my instructions on how to build a background information by using World Book Online and find scholarly articles in EBSCO. I showed the students the print and digital resources we had in our collections. 

What time to learn citing sources can be more appropriate than that when the students work with resources for their projects?!   "Where to find a good picture?" , "Map?", "Music?", "How to insert them in your presentation?",  "How to give credits to the sources?",  "Where to put those credits?" - students puzzled.
They helped each other and had our support all the time. 

Besides learning the content the students exploited technology. They worked with Google documents and learned how to share their presentation online via Google Presentations. Seeing that all of them chose Power Point Presentation as a way to present their final projects Sara Jane and I agreed that our next project will include some new formats that kids can explore and use in future: prezi, glogster, slideshare, photostory, and several more.