Over the past month I've had the real pleasure of interviewing almost all of the finalists from the 2010 Governor General's Award for Excellence in Teaching Canadian History.

Right from the first year that I was involved with the program, I was struck by the how genuine and interesting the recipients were. You really would have a hard time finding a nicer group of six people.

So a few years ago we started doing video in the classroom with the six recipients, but that really didn't seem fair considering the tremendous depth of the competition.

So this year, with our new website in tow, we've conducted interviews with many of the recipients, and the results are similar to the video. Again I was struck by how willing all of the finalists are to share their experience and to pass on their knowledge.

Which got me excited when I was thinking that we have nearly 20 interviews and probably more than three hours of interviews recoded. It's a unique primary source on how history is being taught in Canada at the moment, in the voice of real teachers.

It's not only an exciting resource to inspire new teachers to what can be accomplished in the classroom, but one that will provide insight into what inspired teachers at this time.

It's ironic in a way, because in the past we simply displayed a lesson plan on the website. But isn't that the same as putting up a text book in front of a student and asking them to read it. It's something we never would expect from any of these recipients.

I'm planning on introducing them each a little more personally over the coming weeks. But take a look through the interviews here (anyone with a link has an interview) or browse through them on the homepage.

Last Friday I had the chance again to sit down with James Dykstra, a history teacher here in Winnipeg. Together the two of us worked on mapping out the Teachmeet/UnConference sessions that we are building for the Manitoba Social Science Teachers Association conference this fall.

We had some great discussions, and I think we have a good plan in place for what we are going to try. The question is how do we facilitate discussion amongst teachers, without speaking for the entire process ourselves. 

The plan we've come up with is to recreate the social bookmarking experience with live action. Now I would love for everyone to pull out their laptops and iPads to share resources, but we're starting small here and I don't want to spend an hour explaining Delicious.

So we're going to have each teacher write down a website or resource, attach their name or online handle, and tag it with three words from a predetermined vocabulary based on themes within the Manitoba curriculum. 

Each of these will be written on construction paper and then posted on the wall, to get people up and moving. After collecting connections based on grade level, we're going to try and physically resort the items by tags, as a way to show the connections between different teachers in the room. Then we can let those teachers speak to each other in groups about common goals or challenges they face in the classroom.

I'm not sure how we will get it all done in 50 minutes, but I think it will be a unique experience compared with most workshops and professional development. I'm excited about how it will develop further over the coming months. And of course we're going to videotape it all to record the experience.

Stay posted!

I really like history, which you probably assumed since I work for Canada's History. So the only thing better than history, is a history field trip. And last week we headed out to the University of Manitoba Archives to see some historical maps and their digitization program.

I stumbled on the Manitoba Historical Maps Photostream a few weeks ago and got in touch with it's creator, Larry Laliberte. As soon as I saw they had digitized the fire insurance maps, one of the best sources for information about Canadian cities, I knew this was a great resource. It's a terrific collection of maps and images related to the history of Manitoba. And best of all, they have all been digitized and made easily available through Flickr.

The use of social media was particularly nice to see. It's great to see organizations making their collections easily available. In Teaching Canada's History I made a point of singling out the McCord Museum and their participation in Flickr Commons. Both collections are really terrific and more museums and archives should follow suit.

Yesterday I mentioned the Past Play conference and the great work that Kevin Kee and Bill Turkel are doing with technology and learning at the academic level. One of the keys to their conference was that they went the route of an unconference. Participants spent the first day essentially "playing" with new technology in the hopes of coming up with new ways to share and portray history.

Presenters also were given the especially fun task of not talking. It sounds strange, but really it sparks more discussion. Rather than simply presenting their paper, attendees could only respond to comments from other members who had already read a draft paper. The results for their conference were extremely positive.

If you have read anything before about my views on teachers conferences, you know I think we have to start changing things now. There is a weird understanding amongst everyone involved that the present model just isn't the way to go forward. At a traditional conference, displayers are dissapointed with declining numbers and the inability to reach their audience, presenters are dissapointed with low retention rates and declining numbers, and attendees are bored with the same content year in and year out.

And perhaps worst of all, school boards and administrators are loosing any hope that professional development through teaching conferences is important or has any role in the regular life cycle of a teacher. Funding to attend the conferences is being cut and redirected towards other programs. And to be honest, I don't blame them.

It's just not an effective model for professional development and it's not working.

So that's why I'm really excited that the Manitoba Social Science Teachers Association is showing some courage and has opened up three workshops at their annual conference to the unconference format. It's a small step in the right direction that I'm very thankful for. We even have special placement in the book: see Teachmeet on page 2.

If you are interested in history and technology than one podcast you should definitely be tuning in is Digital Campus from the Center for History and New Media. Recently, Canadian historians Kevin Kee and Bill Turkel joined the podcast for a discussion of their recent unconference called "Past Play."

Held in Niagara-on-the-Lake the conference brought together historians to collaborate and play with new technologies. The project is the start of what will hopefully be a full publication, the details of which are available here.

It's exciting stuff for historians who are interested in engaging audiences with new ways of sharing the past. "We've got used to expressing history as text," Keven Kee notes, "and that's part of the problem. We need to move beyond, so what are the other forms we can explore."

Bill Turkel, who was one of my former profs at the University of Western Ontario, follows that "every sort of object around us is some kind of time traveller from the past and yet for some reason we choose to convey our conciousness, our understanding, of the past often in text."

I'm particularly interested in the format of the conference which was intended to facilitate a social and playful structure to lead to new ideas, rather than simply presenting information which has already been published.

Website development and community building takes a lot of time. There just aren't any shortcuts to creating an effective online community, no matter who it is. But things also sometimes move quicker than others and this week has been moving really quickly with our new education community.

Two weeks ago we sent Jennifer Janzen from the Unviersity of Winnipeg Collegiate packed with all our new bells and whistles from our website to the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking Summer Institute. Jennifer was a really enthusiastic and really jumped in head first, and without her none of this could have been possible. She blogged, took pictures for her new Flickr feed, and interviewed various participants about why they were attending the Summer Institute.

The results have been really great to see and we even recorded our first video interview back here at the University last Friday:

This is the type of support that our website is designed to provide to history and education organizations across Canada. Events like the summer institute bring together Canada's brightest teachers to talk about teaching, and creating a digital repository of the event allows that experience and the amazing ideas that come out of it to be shared with a considerably larger audience.

It's the type of experience that I want to continue to develop through our website as a focal point for discussion on Canadian History. And thus, why I'm extremely happy this week.

I'm working with Jennifer Janzen, a teacher at the University of Winnipeg Collegiate this week. Her students are researching Canadian explorers and I'm helping them learn how to use Google Maps to create their own interactive maps of Canadian exploration. It's actually a lesson plan that you can find here that I outlined a few years ago, and I'm excited to see how it goes in the classroom.

The list of explorers that we are looking at includes:

• Martin Frobisher 1576-1578 (Suneet and Chloe)
• Henry Hudson 1610-1611 (Joey and Jill)
• Samuel Hearn 1769-1772 (Ila and Jerard)
• Alexander MacKenzie 1789 (Rene and Delaney)
• William Edward Parry 1819-1820 (Lily and Jay)
• John Ross 1829-1833 (Jesse and Sarah)
• George Back 1833-35
• Captain Sir John Franklin 1845-1848 (Kate and Colin)
• John Rae 1846-1847 (Clayton and Breanna)
• Richard Collinson 1850-1855 (Rina and Gulkesh)

I've always thought that one of the hardest areas to teach is what life was like in the interwar and post-world war two period. The weight of the wars and the depression tend to inhale a lot of time for any class, often leaving little time to deal with other topics.

It creates a real challenge of finding other topics that are teachable and interesting to students in these time periods. I've always thought that Joe Stafford (a GG Award recipient from 2008) really captured this with his diamond jubilee project. Within the interwar period in the 1920s, he had found an original and interesting teachable moment that said something unique about the time.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was continuing my reading of Pierre Berton's biography. It turns out that Berton's big break came in 1947 when he travelled up to the Nahanni river. A minor international interest had developed over the area and Berton flew up to bring the story back to Canadians. It was picked up by the wire services and broadcast around the world (I’m still trying to find a good source for them, but you should be able to find them at your local library, especially if you are in Vancouver).

Now I had read about the Nahanni River in back issues of The Beaver magazine, and had never really thought much about it. But here you have a moment that seems to catch the still remoteness of Northern Canada only just over sixty years ago. Shuttled into his place, Berton landed in an area all but unknown to the rest of the world.

Berton's crazy trip up north and the wire stories that followed would seem to open themselves up to a wonderful array of moment that describe transportation, communications, and information technology in the post-war period.

To leave you with something particularly fun to try out over the long weekend. Lots of teachers are doing more with computer games in the classroom. You need only check out one of last year's Governor-General award winning teachers, Lindsay Hall, to get some ideas.

One set of games you might want to take a look at is the warfare series from armour games. Warfare 1917 and Warfare 1944 are two simple flash games that give a surprisingly quick and realistic look at what warfare was like. In particular, the 1917 version, shows a variety of different units, the effects of gas, mortars, and many of the more gruesome aspects of trench warfare.

Now to be clear, I'm not suggesting you sit your entire class down in front of a computer to have them play these games for a hour. But you might want to use them as a 20 minute introduction to trench warfare and what it looked like, as well as getting your students to talk about the things that either aren't included or seem less realistic.

It's another way to look at the Great War, and with the right approach it might be fun starting point.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Pierre Berton’s biography at a local bookstore here in Winnipeg. Brian McKillop, the author, describes how as a high school student he was given a copy of Pierre Berton’s Klondike to read over the summer. “The name of the author meant nothing to me, but after reading that book on Lake Rozena near the Lake of the Woods,” he says, “I knew that Canadian history was certainly not dull.”

I enjoyed the moment because a similar story happened to me back in high school. During grade eleven I had decided to enter an essay contest in Maclean’s magazine about the most important event in Canadian history. I shopped around a few moments such as Confederation, Expo, but settled on the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

Looking for history, I picked up a copy of Pierre Berton’s Vimy at the local Sudbury Public Library. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite so quickly, over the course of a weekend if I remember correctly.

The storytelling and the experience of the soldiers was fascinating, especially since my interest in warfare up to that point had primarily been about battles, tanks, and aircraft. Somewhere in Vimy Ridge, I learned about storytelling and engaging readers with history, and was otherwise fascinated by the event. It was a great read, and before I finished my grade eleven year, I had signed up for my first official history course for grade twelve, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The essay I wrote for Maclean’s, really more of a paraphrasing of Vimy now that I look back on the exaggerated wording and metaphors (quintessential Berton), managed to grab 3rd place, was read at my local school’s fall remembrance day ceremony, and finally was picked up by the Honorable Brent St. Denis, former Liberal Member of Parliament for Algoma-Manitoulin.

As part of his efforts to have Vimy Ridge Day made official by parliament, he read an excerpt in the House of Commons, my own little primary document ensuring my place in history. You can read it here on this great website, openparliament.ca.

Pierre Berton’s story of Vimy Ridge inspired me to study history and work on my writing, even if I didn’t understand the profound impact it had on me at the time.

Of course it was only year’s later, after having visited Vimy Ridge and read more about Canada’s war experience and the experience of soldiers at war, that I also finally came to understand the last line of Vimy that so puzzled me in grade eleven.

Despite the importance to Canada, against the cost of so many lives, “Was it worth it? The answer, of course, is no.”