Tag Archives: Digital Teaching Tools

Remote Learning with American Studies

By Carolyn Blume, Andreas Hübner, Michaela Keck

With this fifth blog, we are com­ing to the end or our series on dig­i­tal teach­ing tools. We hope that you’ve been inspired by some of the Amer­i­can Stud­ies links rang­ing from the heart-warm­ing and hilar­i­ous antics of humans and ani­mals to the more schol­ar­ly posts on Aca­d­e­m­ic Earth.

Make Way for Duck­lings by Nan­cy Schön in Boston Pub­lic Garden
Google Lit Trips
By Carolyn Blume

“Trav­el is fatal to prej­u­dice, big­otry, and nar­row-mind­ed­ness.” Mark Twain

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Keep calm and follow the news

By Joannis Kaliampos

As Amer­i­can stud­ies and for­eign lan­guage edu­ca­tion schol­ars, we some­times tend to over­look the vast demand for teach­able online resources out­side of acad­e­mia. My work in the transat­lantic blend­ed-learn­ing edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tive Teach About U.S. has helped me to estab­lish long-stand­ing rela­tion­ships with high school teach­ers and edu­ca­tors in Ger­many and the Unit­ed States. Amid the cur­rent glob­al health cri­sis, these teach­ers are step­ping up to sup­port their stu­dents and find nov­el ways to engage them in edu­ca­tion­al activ­i­ties while they strug­gle with ‘the new nor­mal’ dur­ing the pandemic.

As schools have been shut down for weeks, many of these col­leagues have reached out to us, seek­ing advice on edu­ca­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy and its imple­men­ta­tion. All too often, they are pushed to cre­ate makeshift solu­tions as their school servers are over­whelmed with the sud­den spike in user demand. Many col­leagues have shared their expe­ri­ence of set­ting up pri­vate chat and social media groups to share assign­ments and edu­ca­tion­al resources, unsure whether this may vio­late school and state rules.

With mis­in­for­ma­tion about the coro­n­avirus on the rise, a his­toric pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cam­paign in the Unit­ed States, and the press under attack from dif­fer­ent sides, I would like to share some of my favorite stu­dent-friend­ly news media as well as resources on media lit­er­a­cy for pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school students.

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Digital American Studies – The ASB Editors’ Favorite Picks (Part I)

By Sabrina Völz

Cred­it: “Netiquette1” by Helen DeWaard

Every­one is writ­ing about the shift to dig­i­tal teach­ing in wake of the coro­n­avirus cri­sis. The focus on Twit­ter and diverse blogs seems to be main­ly on how to use var­i­ous con­fer­enc­ing and dig­i­tal tools, such as Zoom, Flip Grid, and Padlet. Since both Maria and I live in some­what rur­al areas with unbe­liev­ably poor inter­net con­nec­tions, com­plete home office is not a pos­si­bil­i­ty for us, and we are won­der­ing how many stu­dents will have prob­lems to use tools that require a high-speed inter­net con­nec­tion. Those stu­dents won’t have the oppor­tu­ni­ty, though, to make use of uni­ver­si­ty resources as we can. For that rea­son alone – and we are sure there are many oth­ers – most of the advice columns say to keep dig­i­tal class­es sim­ple and syn­chro­nous learn­ing lim­it­ed. We would, there­fore, like to offer our read­ers a few sug­ges­tions for the teach­ing of Amer­i­can Stud­ies that may ease the bur­den. Why re-cre­ate the wheel when you don’t need to?

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