Thank you for attending our session, "Analyzing Works of Art to Interpret Hard History" at the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) Conference in Nashville, TN. Our slidedeck appears below:

Thank you for attending the sessions either at the virtual National Council for History Education (NCHE) Conference, the Missouri Council for History Education (MOCHE) Conference in St. Louis, or the National Conference for the Social Studies (NCSS) Conference in Philadelphia. A copy of the slides can be viewed here or embedded below. If you click on the lower right-hand corner, you may view the slides full-screen.

The handouts and electronic documents featured in the presentation can be downloaded and/or copied below:

1. Trivial Pursuits assignment and collaborative document
2. Secret Messages
3. Death of Mr. Bolos

For my second-ever (and final) "Opening Day" speech (as President of the New Trier Education Association), I chose to focus on the future of public education in light of a national teacher shortage. I used a publishing platform called "Medium" (iOS app available) because of the balance it affords between multimedia and text. See the original slidedeck here or embedded below.



FULL TEXT BELOW: The Future of Public Education

Thank you for attending my NCHE (National Council for History Education) Conference presentation on March 15th, 2019. Below is an embedded version of my slide deck. You can view it full-screen by clicking in the lower right-hand corner of the presentation window.

If you would like access to the shared folder of lesson materials, please click here. Although the permission has been set to "view only", you should be able to download anything in the folder or make a copy of an existing document.

Thank you for attending my NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) Conference presentation on November 18th, 2017. Below is an embedded version of my slide deck. You can view it full-screen by clicking in the lower right-hand corner of the presentation window.

If you would like to access the Google Doc of media literacy principles and the bonus material using Schoolhouse Rock, please click here.

Thanks to everyone who attended our session. I will upload the entire slidedeck as well as links to the apps and websites mentioned.

• Steller
• VoiceThread
• Yogile

Please make sure you contribute a photo to our "Making the Mundane Beautiful" #atwarwiththeobvious social slideshow HERE.

For now, here is the original slidedeck as presented to my American Studies students:

Thank you for attending our session today at the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) Conference in New Orleans. Please feel free to contact either of us:

• Spiro Bolos (Teacher, New Trier High School)
• Tom Kucharski (Instructional Supervisor, Glenbrook South High School)

Below is an unabridged version of our presentation that you can use in the classroom. It includes strategies for talking to students about race, as well as a full array of statistics on mass incarceration.



For classroom materials and embedded links to multimedia, please click on the image below:

Dan Lawler and I participated in a presentation/panel discussion called, "Inclusive Schools and Education Equity" in which the following questions were posed:

1. What does it mean to be a welcoming school district within the constraints of segregated housing patterns? 
2. What can suburban residents do to effect change in a metropolitan system that sanctions separate and unequal educational opportunities? 
3. Does diversity in schools create a net gain for all?

GUEST PANELISTS:

• Dan Lawler and Spiro Bolos, New Trier's Metropolitan Community Project
• Steve Bogira, The Chicago Reader
• Kourtney Cockrell, Student Enrichment Services at Northwestern University

For my "Opening Day" speech (as President of the New Trier Education Association), I chose to focus on the theme of race, and I used a publishing platform called "Medium" (iOS app available) because of the beautiful balance it affords between multimedia and text. See the original slidedeck here.

A Lighthouse

Thank you for participating in today's session. Below is an embedded slideshare of the presentation.

Based on Cariou v. Prince, _ F.3d _ (2d Cir. 2013).

Patrick Cariou published a book of photographs of Rastafarians and landscapes taken in Jamaica. Richard Prince utilized portions of and entire images from Cariou’s photographs in 28 paintings, many of which were shown in the Gagosian Gallery.

Slides are numbered for classroom or workshop: each participant can use the critical reasoning process to make a fair use determination. NOTE: some content may be deemed NSFW. For a detailed analysis, please visit Rebecca Tushnet's "Transformativeness doesn't require commentary on original" as well as Kenneth Crews' analysis of the "Four Factors" at Columbia University (quoted above).


NOTE: click the four expanding arrows on the presentation in order to view full-screen.

UPDATE: the five photos sent back to the lower court were recently the subject of a settlement. Terms were not disclosed.

This presentation was given at the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) Conference in Seattle, WA, and at the CASE (Council on American Studies Education) Conference at the Art Institute in Chicago by Thomas E. Kucharski and Spiro Bolos, both of New Trier High School.

Using US History, Michelle Alexander's recently published book, The New Jim Crow, and 20th century African-American responses to racism, we will examine strategies for our students' social/political engagement with racism.

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Our slides:
 

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Our handout: 
 

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Prison Industrial Complex links and video:

The Prison Industrial Complex from Spiro Bolos on Vimeo.

NOTE: to play the video fullscreen, click on the "expand" icon in the lower right-hand corner of the video box (while playing). If you are using a PC, hit "F11" to minimize the browser. 
 
Downloadable PDF of Zine illustrated and designed by Billy Dee. Music by Loscil.

For my visit to Smiley and West's The Poverty Tour 2.0 in Alexandria, Virginia, I wanted to document the event for my students and others by using Twitter to broadcast and archive memorable quotes from the hosts and guest speakers.

But finding a site that allowed tweets to be viewed in chronological order proved to be a major challenge until I stumbled upon this function within Storify. For now, the quotes alone will suffice, but I want to learn how to add different forms of media to enrich this "presentation". Check it out below:

Thanks to my wonderful sophomore students, I had an opportunity to present, discuss, and solicit feedback regarding my take on Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Because in the future I am only allotted 50 minutes to present and respond to questions, I've taken my students' feedback and eliminated about 1/3 of the slides. Below appears the unabridged slide deck, including the 2 videos I played when I presented. Enjoy.

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1. "An American Studies": co-authored with John S. O'Connor, my English teaching partner. It features links to all (40+) of our students' individual blogs.
2. "Modern World History": a class I taught in the past which used a different blogging platform called Posthaven, somewhat similar to Tumblr. It allows you to post just about anything via email.
3. "US History": a class I currently teach in an experimental classroom, it also uses the Posthaven platform instead of Blogger, my traditional favorite.

• Fair Use Music Videos
• Fair Use Case Studies
• Even more resources at the Media Education Lab, including a link to Renee Hobb's book, Copyright Clarity.

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If you are interested in this timely topic and might not be able to attend the national (ed-tech) ISTE Conference this year, two free webinars (online conference sessions) are scheduled soon:

1. "Copyright Clarity" on learncentral, presented by Kristin Hokanson and myself. Created by Gwyneth Jones, this is a free Elluminate web event, sponsored by Blackboard. It is intended for ISTE SIGMS members (library/media specialists), but anyone is welcome to attend. If you have a computer with a microphone, you should be able to participate on Monday, March 14, 2011 at 7:00 pm, CDT. Join us now by clicking on this link.
2. "Copyright Clarity and Fair Use for Digital Learning", presented by Renee Hobbs, author of Copyright Clarity, Kristin Hokanson and myself. It is intended for ISTE SIGTC members (technology coordinators), but anyone is welcome to attend. Sign up here to attend online on Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 7:00 pm CDT.

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As promised, these are the presentation slides from the 2011 CASE Conference at the Chicago History Museum, co-presented with John S. O'Connor. Our classroom blog is called An American Studies, and can be found at www.anamericanstudies.com.

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As promised, these are the presentation slides from the 2011 CASE Conference at the Chicago History Museum, co-presented with John S. O'Connor. Our classroom blog is called An American Studies, and can be found at www.anamericanstudies.com.

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There's nothing quite so intimidating to students as delivering an oral presentation in front of their peers. And unfortunately, many students use the opportunity to turn their slides into text-heavy TelePrompTer screens. This might be due to the fact that the students are merely imitating what they see daily in the classroom: how many of us have subjected our classes to bullet point after bullet point, in an attempt to convey as much content as possible in the shortest period of time?

What I have tried to do is provide my students with training on how to communicate effectively, both orally and visually. But I also want to lower their performance anxiety. This is accomplished by sharing the presentation duties: one slide, one student, in a co-created Google Docs presentation. An added bonus was that the students could see each other's work during the creation process, thus upping the overall quality.

Finally, my greatest hope was that they would critically examine the choices they  made, in what and how they communicated. Ron Ritchhart, in his Intellectual Character, emphasizes the need for "Routines for Discussing and Exploring Ideas" in establishing an intellectual environment (94). One example is "The Why Routine". In the assignment featured below, students were asked to provide the following for a historical mock trial (on the subject of the Boston Massacre):

1. Find an image that you believe represents your witness or their testimony in some way. You should be creative here as long as YOU can explain why you think it is representative of your witness.
2. Choose ONE quote that either helps or hurts the Defendant, depending on whether your witness is on the side of the Prosecution or the Defense. Why is it the best quote?
   

Although the above finished product lacks student voices, the key to this activity was the oral presentation itself. Each time a student presented their individual slide, I asked them WHY they made the particular choices. It was illuminating as they were "making thinking visible": everyone else in the classroom understood the importance of providing a rationale for choices of images and quotes. As you can see, some ideas worked better than others!

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Although I try to re-examine what I teach every year, I always begin the school year in the same way in my history courses. To briefly summarize, I fake my own death (with a wink and a nod), in order to introduce the students to the discipline of history. The students are asked to write a biography of their "dead" teacher, using personal artifacts, interviews, and other sources.
As our district focuses specifically on inquiry this year, I am reminded of Ron Ritchhart's Intellectual Character, and his chapter entitled, "First Days, First Steps: Initiating a Culture of Thinking". Here he asks these critical questions:

"What messages [do] teachers convey when they plunge students right in to a big subject matter issue?" (62)

How do the "first days of school...establish norms of interaction between students and teachers?" (69-70)

Below is a VoiceThread (narrated presentation) describing the specifics of the activity. NOTE: this was recorded for a group of 1st Year teachers who were in an orientation session the week before school started:






How do you begin the school year with your students? To see another possibility, listen and watch this radio piece (set to images) by English teacher John S. O'Connor.







Written by John O'Connor — English Teacher, New Trier High School. John O'Connor reflects on what teachers face on the first day of school. O’Connor is the author of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom (National Council of Teachers of English, 2004). Originally aired on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago.

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