Category Archives: online

New Electoral College Video from FJCC!

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One of our goals going into the new school year is to work on creating a series of student friendly civics videos, including ones for each of the benchmarks. Indeed, we have someone working right now on a new video for Benchmark SS.7.C.1.6, which addresses the Preamble. There will be opportunities for us, however, to include additional civics-oriented content rich videos and this new one is our first! This video explores what the Electoral College is, how it impacts elections, and the relationship between the Electoral College and the popular vote.
We hope that you find this video useful, and please feel free to send me feedback or leave a comment!


Hey Elementary Teachers! We have civics resources!

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Over the past few years, at the request of teachers and in an effort to address ongoing issues with social studies at the elementary level, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship has worked to create resources for K-5 elementary teachers. Under the visionary work of our curriculum director. Ms. Valerie McVey, and in collaboration with teachers from across the state of Florida, we have three main tools for you to consider.

modulesOur K-5 Modules are extended lessons plans that are aligned with the Florida Next Generation Sunshine State Standards for Social Studies, as well as with the Language Arts Florida Standards (LAFS). If you are not a Florida teacher, you can adapt these lessons for use in your own classroom simply by reviewing the alignment to your own state standards, keeping in mind that the LAFS benchmarks are essentially a redraft of Common Core as well. These modules involve a great deal of work with text and text skills while exploring an essential question around a civics topic.

Civics Correlation GuideThe Civics Correlation Guide to Current K-5 Reading Series is intended for Florida teachers and uses all of the current Reading series that have been adopted in Florida from Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, Pearson, Studies Weekly, and McGraw-Hill. You can search by benchmark and/or publisher, and you can see just how strong the correlations are. If you are not from Florida, I encourage you to review Florida’s elementary civics benchmarks here to see if you can use this resource in your own classroom.

civics in a snap

Civics in a Snap! For when you have just enough time to help your kids learn about being good citizens!

Civics in a Snap is our newest resource, developed in the summer of 2015 in collaboration with elementary teachers from Dade and Pinellas Counties here in Florida. The intent of these lessons, which are also aligned with language arts standards, is to provide teachers with quick 15 to 20 minute lessons aligned with Florida’s elementary civics benchmarks. Our hope and belief is that every teacher can find 15 minutes in a week to teach kids what it means to be a citizen!

So, how do you access all this awesome stuff? Well, our good friend from Bay, Alana Simmons, was kind enough to create this overview, and we want to share this with you. Simply follow the directions below to complete your free registration and explore to your heart’s content! You can access the sign up page here! 

accessing resources

Questions about any of our resources, materials, or civics in Florida and beyond can be directed to Steve Masyada here at the FJCC!


Two short primary source lessons about suffrage for women!

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Following a historic night in which a woman for the first time accepted the nomination of a major political party for President of the United States (NOTE: FJCC TAKES NO POSITION ON CANDIDATES), I just want to share with you two relevant lessons we have in our new Students Investigating Primary Sources series. One is targeting US History and the other targets US Government and are aligned to Florida benchmarks (though you can adapt them for your use!); both use a very interesting resource.

womens suffrage lesson

The letter included in each short lesson argues against the 19th Amendment from the perspective of women, and students are asked to really interrogate the document, or portions of the document, in different ways within each course.

Please keep in mind that these are NOT intended to be deep explorations of issues, government, or historical topics; rather, these are essentially mini-lessons that introduce students to both a primary source and a historical or government-related topic within a 15-25 minute time frame. It’s a chance, essentially, to let them build their understanding and use of primary sources and relevant skills around them. And these two lessons are perfect, I think, during this historic election season!

You can find the lesson centered around US History benchmarks here, and the lesson centered around US Government benchmarks here.

And if you are interested in how American women have fought long for the right to vote, visit the National Women’s History Museum! 


A New Video Overview of What the FJCC Offers

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One of the long term goals of the FJCC is to provide short, quality videos that teachers can use with their students. While we are quite proud of our content videos that feature Dr. Fine, more student-friendly videos that go beyond simply the talking head approach would, we believe, be useful for both teachers and students. We are happy to say that we are making some progress in this area. Our first video provides you with an overview of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship and what sorts of tools and resources we have to offer. Please share it with your friends!


New E-Book on Election Law

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ebenchbook

 

This is a resource that social studies and civics educators might find useful. The William and Mary Law School, in collaboration with the National Center for State Courts, have launched a new website which, while intended for judges, can be useful for ALL citizens as they seek to understand election law. As the current political primary campaign season has shown, many citizens seem greatly confused about election law. This is a useful resource as we go into the general election and convention season. While it currently has only Colorado, Virginia, and, of course, Florida (we all know that no election litigation ever pops up in Florida), the creators of the project do plan on expanding it beyond the three pilot states.

For more information on this resource and why it is necessary, I encourage you to take a look at this article from the Election Law Program that includes some rather interesting discussion involving lawyers and judges involved in both this project and election law cases.

If you have a resource like this, or involving civics and social studies education in general, please share it with me so that I can share it with others!


New FJCC Teacher Advisory Council

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One of our great friends in civic education is iCivics. As part of their work and their effort to provide the best possible quality materials, they have a Teacher’s Council that works closely with them. Here at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship, we are contemplating the creation of a similar council made up of FJCC resource users. This council will serve to advise us on directions for resource development and research and opportunities for new directions, suggest revisions concerning current resources, and generally serve as a way in which we can expand outreach to and collaboration with our stakeholders across the state of Florida.

If this is something that interests you, please shoot me an email. Note that there WILL be an application process of sorts. I expect that we will have this launching around the time of the October Florida Council for the Social Studies conference. We are very excited for this new effort!


First Annual Florida Civics Teacher Survey

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In our efforts to improve our work and help teachers in their efforts to build the next generation of citizens, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship is looking for feedback from teachers. To facilitate this, we have created a survey, which should take about 15 minutes.

The survey asks teachers about Classroom Climate, Coverage of Instructional Benchmarks, School Climate, Professional Development, Classroom Instructional Practices & Resources Used, Availability & Use of Classroom technology, Demographics & Background

Ultimately, we are seeking to understand how you, the great civics teacher that you are, approach classroom instruction and work with your future citizens. Completing this survey will be a huge help for us, and we are grateful for your assistance and support. You can complete the survey here. Thank you in advance for your collaboration and cooperation!


The FJCC is Looking for Item Writers!

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Update: We have sent out invitations. Thank you for your interest!

 

Do you teach social studies in Florida, particularly civics? Do you have or would like some experience developing EOCA type items? Do you understand the 7th grade civics benchmarks and the role of the benchmark clarifications? Then we would like to bring you in to the Lou Frey Institute on the 13th and 14th of June to work on helping us develop items for EOCA practice and review!

This will be a two day session. While the agenda is still being crafted, it will be led by our Dr. Terri Fine and yours truly. Day One will provide and overview and experience with the process and Day Two will give you the opportunity to write items! You will be compensated for your time, travel, and effort. We are hoping to recruit up to ten folks for this project, and would like at least regional diversity in participants. If you are interested, please shoot me an email, describing your teaching experience, item writing experience if any, and your district and school. Once we have ten folks, we will be ready to go. Thanks for your willingness to help your fellow teachers here in Florida!


Teaching Controversial Topics Webinar Up!

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Last week, I had the great pleasure of attending a webinar on teaching controversial topics, which featured discussion from social studies and civics professionals from across the country. Well, happily, the webinar is now up on the Teaching For Democracy Alliance webpage. It is definitely worth your time, especially the conversation with Dr. Paula McAvoy. Her new book with Dr. Diana Hess is an excellent read.  You can access the webinar here.
TFD Webinar

Of course, being the happy web denizens that we are, there was an ongoing discussion of the webinar on twitter at #EducatetoParticipate. Check out the Storify for additional links, resources, and discussion!

Storified

 


New Resource for History and Government!

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sips page 1

Students Investigating Primary Sources, or SIPS, is a brand new free resource from the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship. This new resource is a K-12 collection of brief introductory mini-lessons centered on particular topics and primary sources. These materials were created in collaboration with the National Archives, Pinellas County Public Schools, and Brevard Public Schools. We will be adding additional grade level materials as they are developed. Please note that the page has issues loading on Internet Explorer! 

org logos

We are very excited to share this with folks, and we hope that you find this useful. Currently, we have resources for high school US History and US Government, but as stated above, we will be adding additional K-12 resources as they are developed, and you are welcome to adapt these current mini-lessons for use in your state. Most excitingly, as the logos show, these are created in direct collaboration with the National Archives, drawing on their resources in conjunction with some of their excellent personnel. As always, however, we wanted to make sure that teachers have a voice, so we brought teachers and district leaders in from Brevard and Pinellas Counties. The resources are available as a PDF and in Word; simply click on ‘Download Original’ to access the Word version if you wish to modify it!

I hope that you find these useful. Please keep an eye out for additional resources as we move forward. We are grateful for our friends at the National Archives and our county partners for their work with the FJCC team! Oh, and our own Val McVey will be presenting on SIPS at NCSS in December! You can access the free SIPS resources on our website.

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