The Place to Learn about how to Teach about Places

In the field of education, place-based education has grown as a unique perspective on learning that focuses on utilizing physical spaces to gain knowledge.  Such an educational approach can be applied quite naturally to the study of history, as history has lived in every space that surrounds us.   Who better than the National Parks Services to develop a website to approach history through the places in which it occured?

Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) is a website created by the NPS to provide resources to educators regarding the study of history through historic places.  The site is strong on central content, but weak in presentation and user effectiveness.  As I discuss the organization, online community, and educational resources the site provides, its substance will stand out over its style.

Organization

Content on the homepage would indicate that the website is updated regularly.  The front page offers lesson resources relating to Black History Month, suggesting that something topical regularly greets the viewer upon their arrival.

One of the website’s greatest strengths is also one of its greatest weaknesses.  While the website certainly has a wealth of lesson plans and educator resources, it does a relatively poor job in organizing them for efficient use. Teachers and educators can browse the available lesson plans by location, theme, time period, and social studies standards.  But little is possible beyond that.  Visitors cannot specify their desired query by utilizing more than one field.  For example, one could not find out quickly or efficiently whether Depression era lesson plans are available for their specific state, but would have to troll through the individual fields themselves.  Unfortunately, visitors cannot look through a complete and comprehensive list of all the lesson plans on one page either.  To make matters worse, no search option exists where visitors can input a query to search all lesson plans for even more specific information.

Among the site’s central downfalls is the incredibly poor navigation structure.  After leaving the front page to peruse the lesson plans, it is difficult to return to the home page and impossible to return to the previous page.  Only after scrolling to the very bottom of a very long page can one find links back to the main page.  For people so concerned with places, you would imagine they’d have better blueprints.

Community
While focused on studying places and how they bring people together, the effort of TwHP to build an online community is modest at best.  One positive feature is the ability to submit new lesson plans.  To streamline the process, the organization has created an online Author’s Packet to create a uniform structure to the lessons submitted.  Providing such a feature can invigorate a virtual community and keep it fresh by facilitating the sharing of  new ideas.  However, to make this a reality, especially on a teacher website, visitors must be able to leave feedback. For lessons provided, teachers should be able to  rate, ask questions, and share testimonials about why lessons did or did not work.  To simply make them available is not enough.  It is unclear when the website was last updated with new submissions, but it appears that it has been some time.  This would indicate that the site has hardly galvanized a community of educators to regularly share new insights, which is of particular concern as new research and insights bring new changes to educational practice all the time.

Educational resources

The organization and format of the lessons presented are clear and consistent.  All lessons consist of the same core sections: Inquiry Question (central objective), Setting the Stage (historical context, Locating the Site (maps), Determining the Facts (Readings), Visual Evidence (pictures), and Putting it All Together (activities).  The clean presentation of the lessons makes it easier for teachers to pull what they need, and if desired, follow closely the outline for lessons provided.  Archival photography and maps adorn many of the pages and provide great resources for the classroom.

But as far as in-class educational utility, the website comes off as little more than an online textbook.  Links within the lesson plans lead to informational texts and pictures.  And although the design is relatively clean and intuitive in organization, it is not appealing or engaging to young people. The dull and relatively lifeless blue and green color scheme can make the website come off more corporate than educational.

Other developments in web design are also noticeably absent.   It would seem only natural that a website dedicated to the study of important locations in this day and age would include the common virtual tour option, but TwHP does not.  Common features like embedded video, audio clips, or Flash animations to enhance the virtual visit to these historic places are no where to be found.  Perhaps these features were not in the budget or beyond the scope of the NPS’s project. As a result, the hollow images can only do so much to manifest the magnificence of our nation’s greatest historical sites for students who constantly crave more and more concrete exposure to the world around them.

Due to the reasons mentioned above, it would appear that the website is really meant for teachers to seek out the resources and then to apply them in their classes, rather than a website for students to peruse indpendently while in class.  As a teacher, there is little utility in having students do something on the computer that does not utilize the technology it provides, especially when you don’t have them in abundance.

If all else fails, do it the old fashioned way: plan a field trip.

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