Google Chat = A Success

   My history class recently got to do a live google chat with an expert from the Museum of Science and Industry!

Picture I took in class during the chat. (Jamie)

   Before doing the chat, we had to prepare ourselves for the information that we were going to learn from him. First, we went to the museum webpage and took a lot at their articles on the topic. We went to this page here , and checked out the text on that page while also making sure to read the pages linked on the side titled "Richard Arkwright" and "Manchester Textile Designers". After getting a little background information about the information that the museum had to offer on their page, we watched a video of the expert, jamie, that we were going to chat with.

     From the video, we were able to take out words that he used while describing the cloth making process and make a vocab list. we had words like carding engine and slubbing. By the end of the video we had a list of vocab words, but no definitions. in groups, we broke up the list and had everyone look up one or two words using google. We had to think back to our first unit and remember how to search successfully. i had to look up other words before i could even define the term i was looking up.


  After getting to know a little more about the mills and machines, it was finally time for the chat. I learned a lot including just how bad the conditions in the mills were. Below is a picture of the flyers on a machine before the cotton was made into thread. The flyers would spin around extremely fast.

Small children used to have to clean between these flyers with little brushes. Children could easily get their hands could in the spinning flyers and their hands would get crushed. Jamie was also able to turn tis machine on and get it running. even through our google chat and with only this one machine running, we could tell the machine was extremely loud. Picturing people listening to that a hundred times worse with all of the machines and all day, just seems awful. People would frequently lose their hearing. Women with long hair could easily get their hair caught in many of the machines and it would either scalp them or take chinks from their hair. Since there was so much cotton fibers in the air, workers' lungs would get filled with fibers and make it hard to breathe as they got older. While using the flying shuttle, women would suck the thread through a whole and it spread disease ad got oil in their lungs. It also caused people to lose their front teeth because they were constantly sucking the thread through the wooden flying shuttle.  Overall, I learned that the factories were not fit for working.


    I really did enjoy doing this google chat. It was something that i had never done before in school and I really was able to gain a lot of information while I was also seeing what was being talked about at the same time. I also got to learn a lot of little fun facts that I wouldn't normally learn from an article or website. It was cool also knowing that we were talking to someone so far away and it watching what they were doing live. I would definatly do this again and recommend it to other teachers and students to do for their classes.

Exhibits, Exhibits, and some more Exhibits

To the left is an image of my group's museum exhibit that we made on the topic of child labor.
Close ups are provided at the  bottom of this post.


To continue our unit on the Industrial revolution, the people in our class were given artifacts that correspond with certain topics. Our artifacts were the pictures, writing pieces, and table. I was actually absent for the first day of this project and missed most of the analyzing the documents, but when I returned to school, my group really helped me understand how they did the analyzing and showed me how they related to the documents. They were really good at catching me up to speed. After checking over our notes, we began drafting the poster which was hard because everyone had different ideas on what they wanted the poster to look like. Eventually, we all decided that the background was going to be black and we were going to put brown boarders and chains on the poster to represent the dark emotions connected with this topic and the actual chains that children pulled things from in their labor. We just really wanted to show people how awful child labor was at the time of the industrial revolution. Kids were forced to pull such heavy things on their backs, crawl in tiny places, and work in dangerous mills. After our exhibit was all finished and put up, we checked out our classmates.


The group that had transportation as their topic did a nice job of using bright colors to show that there wasn't really that many negative things to say about it. Trains and boats were able to get people farther away faster, import and export goods, etc.


I also learned from the standard of living and economics exhibit that during the industrial revolution, pollution was more of a problem than it had ever been before in the past. Something else I learned was that from the 18th century and into the 19th century, the cost of living was getting higher and higher and the earnings of people were staying the same.


From another exhibit I found out that before the industrial revolution, families each had their own loom and it was very valuable to them. As factories and mills became more common, the valuable looms in each family just weren't cutting it out anymore, so the families would be forced to move into the city and work in a mill.


The last exhibit I visited was all about slavery. and the group set it up in a very creative way. They had a wagon wheel that you could actually spin in order to read what they had on their poster and I thought it was an interesting way to get the information across.


All in all this project allowed us to be creative and still learn a lot of important information. My close ups are below.

A Revolutionary Revolution

     To begin our unit on the industrial revolution, our class watched a brief video that gave us a lot of brief information about this revolution. Our main focus was to figure out what things were revolutionary about the revolution.  We then put these "things" in categories labeled people, technology, resources, and transportation. In my opinion, the two most important categories are people and technology.


     During the industrial revolution, people and the way they worked changed for the better. Before the industrial revolution, 80% of people were farmers trying to feed everyone. Today, only 1% of people claimed that farming was their occupation. This drastic change was due to new farming techniques. The fields were being made larger, fertilizer was being used, and much more crops were being harvested each year with less farmers. With the improved techniques and fertilizers, crops that were out of season could be grown and eaten during every season. The enclosure movement also helped the farming industry. Fields that were once occupied by peasant farmer, were fenced off by rich landowners and created more space to cultivate more crops. Also, this created more pastures for sheep which increases the wool that was being collected. With more wool there is a need for more workers and that was also now possible because not as many farmers were needed to grow crops so they could move into the cities and work the machines. With everything taken into account, the death rates were declining. Now there was not such a risk for famine. Also, women were healthier and having healthier babies. All in all, people's jobs during the industrial revolution changed and they were living longer.



     Another important aspect to the industrial revolution, is the technology that is being invented. There were many inventions that contributed to the clothing industry. The spinning jenny, flying shuttle, and water frame all increased the production in textile mills. These inventions were the cause for factories. More machines could be stored and operated all at once and more clothing could be made. Spinning was significantly faster which made clothing ore available to the people. With more factories, more electrical energy was needed. This problem was solved by the invention of the steam engine which produced electrical energy by burning coal to power trains, boats, and these new large factories. One last invention is the improved iron. The Darby family was able to find ways to make cheaper and stronger iron while also removing the impurities. Now iron was more reliable and more railroads could be made with it for more transportation.


Now these of course aren't the only good things from the industrial revolution. There are many more but this is just to give you an idea. To view the video my class watched click HERE.

Image from HERE . 

Exploring the Web

     This past week, my class has been getting used to using online search engines and really figuring out how to find the information we need and make sure we can trust and use it. We learned tips on how to search for information and tips for how to tell whether or not a source is real and trustworthy. 

     The fist activity my class did was a Google a Day. A Google a Day is an online activity and the goal of it is to find answers to the questions they give by searching on the website. By doing this activity, I learned more tricks on how to search things through google to get the results I want. For example, putting quotation marks around certain words will ensure that they will be in the results. I also learned that you may be given a question and have to search other topics before you can answer the question because you may need background information about things in the question. I found this activity to be fun because I liked being in a competition with my classmates. However, it did get frustrating at times when you felt like there was nothing left to look up and you didn't know how you were ever going to find the answer. I still do recommend this activity and if you would like to check it out, click HERE. 

     Accuracy, authenticity, and reliability are all important things a source should have to be trusted and used for gathering information. Accuracy has to do with the correctness of the information displayed. Authenticity is how true and genuine something is. Lastly, reliability is the ability to be depended on. To test our knowledge on these three key terms, we tested a website to see if it was accurate, authentic, and reliable. The website is titled "Help Save the Endangered Northwest Tree Octopus". We found this website to be authentic because it told us exactly what it was supposed to tell us about the tree octopuses, but it wasn't accurate because the information was false and there are no such things as northwest tree octopuses, and it is not reliable either because the author and organizations linked with this site aren't credible. All in all, the website should not be used for school work. To go to this site and check it out click HERE.

During this week, I learned how to be a more productive researcher. 

 
A picture of the so called "pacific northwestern tree octopus".
Link to picture is HERE. (also used as the link above) 

Teachers, John Green, and Me

 

    My name is Julia and I am currently a sophomore at Reading Memorial High School this year. I have created this blog to talk about what I am learning in my honors history 10 class. Our class has gone paperless and has turned to technology in order to help us learn everything this year for history class.
    What makes a teacher great? I believe that in order to be a great teacher, there must be freedom given to those who are being taught. I think giving kids freedom will allow them to become comfortable in the class and enjoy the class more. I also think getting to know all of the students in the class is extremely important so that you know where they are coming from when they speak in the class. One of my favorite teachers in the past was funny so she kept us all entertained, but was also strict when she needed to be. Once a week at the end of class we would all take 5 minutes and go around the room sharing things about us to get to know each other more. I also think that it was very important that she let us choose who we wanted to work with so we could work with people who we know and don't feel bad when you don't want to use their ideas. One last thing that made her a great teacher, was how she let everyone express their own opinions even when they weren't her own. I think this year having a fun engaging way to teach the lessons will benefit everyone.
     Recently my class watched a John Green video about how students should take advantage of their education and do great things with it. I agree with the points that John Green makes in his video. He mentions that we have this opportunity to learn so much for free. Also, he states that he is paying taxes so that we can go to school because when he is old, we will be the leaders of America. I never had thought about it like that. My goal for school this year is to do what John Green said and take advantage of being able to learn so much everyday. I will do this by making sure I stay focused.
To watch the John Green video, click the link below:

John Green Video
 Image from http://www.yvheadstart.com/yvhs/news/