Visual Essays

Greetings colleagues! I am writing to you this week as I'm finishing up my LAST unit of the school year! In fact, it is my LAST unit as a Social Studies teacher (for now). I recently accepted a job as the broadcasting teacher and technology specialist in my school. I'm excited but super overwhelmed. My job is going to look so different next year that I cannot picture it right now. This summer - it's so close!

But I digress. The unit that we just finished up was over Reconstruction in the United States. Yes, the Civil War is quite significant, but Reconstruction certainly changed the United States for a good 90 years or so, plus has lingering consequences today. To get my students to understand its impact, I had them do the DBQ Project's Reconstruction DBQ while also doing a case study on a modern case of racism (within the last five years). I felt it was important for students to see related connections - it also makes history more relevant!

The culmination of each DBQ is a 5-6 paragraph essay. I'll be honest; it's the end of the year, and I definitely didn't want to grade another essay! So I had my students do what I call a "visual" essay. This is when the students follow the same process as creating an essay, but in the end, they take the writing process and create something visual. The best three applications that I've found for creating visual essays are Piktochart, Spark Page, and Canva. For this unit, my students used Piktochart.

We spent four days going over the DBQ packet. The students analyzed four documents to answer the question, "North or South: who killed Reconstruction?" They completed the DBQ packet by filling out an outline in which they responded to the question with their opinion, and used evidence from the documents to support their answer.






They then took their outline and turned it into a Piktochart.

Did this go well? Yes! It was great for the end of the year, the students appreciated learning about something that connected to present-day, and though the Piktochart iPad app is lacking in some usability, they enjoyed trying a new app and liked the creativity and choices that it offered.

This week I'm encouraging you to try something new, maybe fun, and definitely engaging with your students. Think outside the box and get your students to connect to your content!

Thanks for reading. I'll see you next week :)

- Rachel

@historicalipad

My Teacherspayteachers website