Teaching with Technology: Digital Tools for Jewish American History Archives

About

Jews Across the Americas works well with traditional written assignments, but if you are looking for some different ways to engage your students, here are some digital assignments that you can substitute for a standard paper or exam.

When adding digital assignments as take-home projects for classes, it is important to balance what other work you are expecting students to do. Here are suggestions about the amount of time the tutorials will take students to complete and how to substitute them for other work required in your class:

• Archives. This tutorial takes about the same amount of work as a 4–6 page paper, but involves some research skills. Portions of this can be done in class or the assignment can be broken into one class assignment (what is an archive) and two smaller assignments (create a collection; create a finding aid). It is also possible to do all three activities in class (one per class session) using groups.
• Exhibits. This tutorial takes about the same amount of work as a 7–10 page research paper and involves many of the same skills. You can decrease the amount of time spent out of class on this assignment by doing some of the steps in class.
• Image Analysis. The beginning image analysis could be either an in-class activity or a short writing assignment (either one page or longer if desired). The advanced image analysis benefits from students having completed the beginning activity but also could be done in-class (for example in groups) or as a short writing assignment.
• Poetic Analysis. This could be either an in-class activity or a short writing assignment. After students complete the activity it would make sense to ask them to pick a poem or song from the book and determine its form and hypothesize about the significance of that form being used.
• Digital Analysis Tutorials. These are all advanced tutorials intended for instructors who are comfortable with digital humanities methods or for students with interests in this field who want to work independently. The simplest of these tutorials which could be used as a stand-alone assignment in class is the Introduction to Data Visualization Tutorial.
  • Data Visualization. The beginning data visualization assignment could be either an in-class activity or a short writing assignment. Students wanting to complete the advanced data visualization will need to have created a data set using the Archive Scraping interactivity.
  • Archive Scraping. The archive scraping activity could be either an in-class activity or a short writing assignment. This activity is the starting point for the Data Visualization and Textual Analysis interactivities.
  • Textual Analysis. Students wanting to complete the textual analysis tool will need to have created a data set using the Archive Scraping interactivity.

As COVID-19 hit the world, many of us were forced to teach online regardless of our desires or natural inclinations. During summer of 2020, funding from the Ruby-Lankford Collaborative Grant allowed Laura Leibman and Blaise Hilde Albis-Burdige to investigate how digital tools can allow undergraduates to make better use of AJHS's online archives for studying Jewish American history. Many of the tutorials featured on the website and the interviews (available in the Jews Across the Americas archive) as well as the general layout of the website are products of that grant. All of the source code and tutorial source code is available on GitHub.

Source: jewsacrossamericas.com/teaching/teaching-with-technology

What I Learned

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