Auburn and Opelika City School Districts

Challenge

How do you get students excited about history? How do you effectively use technology to support classroom instruction? Auburn and Opelika City School Districts in Alabama asked LetterPress Software to develop technology products that would help classroom teachers more effectively engage students in deeply exploring important historical topics or events.

Solution

LetterPress created a series of technology-based lesson supplements for teaching United States history. These history lessons are based on a new model of inquiry-based classroom instruction that LetterPress has been researching in cooperation with professional historians.

A teacher using one of these supplements for group instruction will project in the classroom the lesson's dramatic multimedia presentation of an historical event or topic. Student inquiry is fostered when the presentation poses relevant historical questions that guide learners in their exploration of the historical content. The teacher periodically interrupts the lesson presentation to access a rich collection of multimedia and Internet resources that have been included to deepen student understanding of the content and to raise additional questions for class discussion. At the end of the primary lesson presentation, the teacher engages the class with an interactive simulation, decision making game, or story based activity that is included with the lesson to further stimulate students' critical thinking skills. After completing the technology-based lesson supplement, the teacher introduces carefully designed off-line research, writing, and project assignments to extend student interaction with the historical content beyond the delivery technology.

Results

Comments from the client:

The work that you all do certainly appeals to the youth of today and gives teachers an opportunity to see the possibility of inquiry based approaches to the topics that they teach.  I know that this is a benefit to our schools in Auburn and Opelika.
Effie Cannon
Auburn City Schools
Secondary Curriculum/Professional Development

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