The Scout Report -- Volume 25, Number 5

From PBS Learning Media comes this interactive, standards-aligned lesson focused on propaganda in World War II. Designed for students in grades 8-12, this digital lesson requires students to use primary sources and media to "examine how and why propaganda was used by combatant nations with such powerful effect during World War II." Over the course of thirteen sections the lesson uses examples of artifacts, documents, and video footage from the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union to "[invite] students to explore history through the experiences of ordinary people and gain important skills in media literacy that they can apply in the present day." Students can annotate and highlight directly in the text of the lesson, and exercises to encourage critical thinking are incorporated throughout the lesson. The final assignment asks students to evaluate the risks and benefits of propaganda and can be completed in written, oral, or multimedia format. Teaching tips for educators are included and anyone can access this lesson by creating a free account. While this resource is designed for student use, its interactive approach may appeal to lifelong learners as well. This lesson was produced by the WGBH Educational Foundation in partnership with the International Museum of World War II. [JDC]

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Fans of American football may appreciate FiveThirtyEight's interactive visualization of NFL history. This project graphs the performance of every current NFL team over time (as well as many teams that no longer exist) to create a visual assessment of each team's strength relative to the rest of the league. Visitors can select their favorite team and view its graph alone, or they can choose to compare it to another NFL team. They can also zoom in to examine the graph in greater detail, and hovering over the graph displays the details of individual games with championships marked by yellow circles. Several highlights are chosen and briefly explained below the graph, including the San Francisco 49ers' strength in the 1980s and 90s and the Dallas Cowboys' resurgence in the 1990s. To quantify and compare the teams' performances across the years, FiveThirtyEight uses the Elo method, which it describes as "a simple measure of strength based on game-by-game results, "to calculate ratings for every game in NFL history. This project was designed by visual journalist Reuben Fischer-Baum, with its statistical model by Nate Silver and additional contributions by Jay Boice and Matthew Conlen. [JDC]

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For those who enjoy learning through videos, the YouTube channel Socratica creates free video courses on a variety of subjects with particular strength in STEM topics. Here, visitors will find well over one hundred concise, well-produced educational videos teaching diverse subjects that range from chemistry to Python tutorials to English grammar. Most videos are approximately five to ten minutes in length, but there are also several playlists that offer short glossaries featuring vocabulary for topics such as chemistry, art, and opera. Students in all disciplines may be interested in Socratica's series on study tips, where they offer advice on how to study effectively and efficiently. The videos on this channel are largely targeted for high school and college students, but anyone interested in their topics will find them valuable. Socratica also has a separate channel, Socratica Kids, where they publish videos intended for younger learners. Founded in 2013, Socratica is run by Kimberly Hatch Harrison, a professional educator with Masters in Molecular Biology from Princeton University, and Michael Harrison, a former software engineer with a Masters in Mathematics from the University of Washington. [JDC]

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Originally featured in the 12-16-2016 Scout Report, Longreads is an excellent place to find high-quality long-form essays and journalism on a wide variety of topics. Recently, their team of editors published this curated list of "stories from 2018 that captured [their] imaginations as deserving of ongoing attention." Here, readers will find recommendations from nine Longreads editors of stories that particularly stuck in their minds. Examples of works highlighted here include This American Life host Ira Glass's commencement speech at the Columbia University School of Journalism's graduation (recommended by Longreads Editor-in-Chief Mike Dang), Kiera Feldman's "Trashed" investigative journalism series on New York City's commercial trash haulers written for Propublica (recommended by Longreads fact-checker and contributing editor Ethan Chiel), and a speculative fiction piece by James Hatley set in the Jim Crow-era South entitled "Always Open, the Eureka Hotel" and published in Strange Horizons (recommended by Longreads writer and contributing editor Danielle Jackson). Each featured piece is accompanied by a brief annotation from the editor who selected it, giving insight into their choice and offering readers a preview to help find what interests them. [JDC]

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First published in 2014, the open-access International Journal of STEM Education describes itself as "a multidisciplinary journal in subject-content education that focuses on the study of teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)." This peer-reviewed academic journal offers educators and readers with an interest in pedagogy an online platform for learning about and publishing interdisciplinary research "regarding, among other topics, the design and implementation of technology-rich learning environments, innovative pedagogies, and curricula in STEM education that promote successful learning in pre K-16 levels, including teacher education." Thus far there are several thematic collections of articles focused on topics, such as international research trends in STEM practices in education, the design of video-based professional development programs for STEM educators, and (most recently) the development of students' science identities, which centers around educational psychology constructs. The International Journal of STEM Education is published by SpringerOpen and indexed by a number of databases including Web of Science, ProQuest, EBSCO, and Google Scholar. Its editorial board hails from universities around the world, and its Editor-in-Chief is Yeping Li, Professor of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M University. [JDC]

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Black History Mini Docs (BHMD) offers its visitors "a fast and entertaining way to educate young and old about the varying contributions of Blacks in American history." As its name suggests, this resource creates and publishes short documentary videos that tell the stories of notable African-American figures throughout history as well as some "everyday unsung heroes in the Black community." Some of the figures highlighted in this series of 90-second videos include poet Langston Hughes, civil rights leaders Ida B. Wells and Betty Shabazz, and music legend Nina Simone. If 90 seconds is still too long, BHMD also occasionally produces "Micro Docs" with similar content that are only 20 seconds long. Readers may also want to check out BHMD's stories section, where they will find written biographies of historical figures like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who was New York's first Congressman of African-American descent and held office from 1945-1971. Those interested in contemporary commentary in the context of Black history will find this type of discussion in this site's blog. BHMD is the creation of award-winning director Neema Barnette and filmmaker Reed R. McCants. [JDC]

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Goin' North is a digital history project that documents the experiences of Black Americans who migrated from the American South to Philadelphia during the First Great Migration. As noted on the project's homepage, the African-American population of Philadelphia soared from 85,000 to 220,000 between 1910 and 1930. During the 1980s, Charles Hardy conducted a series of oral history interviews with individuals who migrated to Philadelphia during this time. These interviews were the basis of his radio documentary "Goin' North: Tales of the Great Migration." Thirty years later, Hardy and Janneken Smucker teamed up to teach the class "Digital Storytelling and the Great Migration to Philadelphia" at West Chester University. During this course, students edited and indexed Hardy's interviews and created an extensive digital archive consisting of "more than 400 images, newspaper articles, and other sources from national and regional collections, including previously unpublished images and ephemera from the Charles Blockson Afro-American Collection and Special Collections at Temple University Libraries and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania." In addition, these students created a series of "digital stories" (using tools including ArcGIS and Atavist) that capture the experiences of those who participated in the Great Migration. Goin' North offers a rich resource for students and instructors of U.S. History. [MMB]

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Educators who would like to incorporate more Black history into their curriculum may be interested in this collection of teaching resources created by NewseumED. This collection comprises eleven different resources, all centered around various aspects of the civil rights movement. Some are interactive resources, such as a searchable civil rights timeline and a media map "comparing newspapers' front page coverage of civil rights milestones across the country." The majority of the collection consists of standards-aligned lesson plans on the civil rights movement in three categories: historical connections, media literacy, and civics & citizenship. These lesson plans include downloadable worksheets and handouts, as well as extension activities that encourage students to dig deeper into the material. While the lesson plans in this collection are primarily intended for middle and high school students, they could also be adapted for use in undergraduate classes. Originally featured in the 1-31-2014 Scout Report, NewseumED is a free online learning platform and the education department of the Newseum, a museum dedicated to media literacy and the First Amendment, and the Freedom Forum Institute, the Newseum's education and outreach partner. [JDC]

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From Digital Maryland comes this excellent collection of historical photographs documenting the lives of African Americans from the 1890s to the 1970s. Digital Maryland notes that "as early as the first settlers who arrived in the state, African American life has been an integral part of Maryland's history." Visitors to this digital collection will find well over two hundred photos, most of which are black and white. They depict Black Marylanders "at work, [their] school life, recreation, communities, public spaces, and individuals," as well as showing scenes from the city of Baltimore and various other locations around the state. When viewing individual photographs, visitors can zoom in to examine them in greater detail, and each photo includes a short description, its date, and other metadata. These photos offer valuable primary sources for historians, scholars, and anyone interested in learning about everyday life for Black Americans in the greater Baltimore region. This digital collection represents a small portion of the larger collection held by the Maryland Department at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. [JDC]

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Freedom Narratives is an ongoing digital history project that "focuses on the enforced migration of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic world during the era of the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th century." This project centers the voices of enslaved people born in West Africa during this time period by using a digital repository of their "autobiographical testimonies and biographical data ...to analyze patterns in the slave trade from West Africa, specifically in terms of where individuals came from, why they were enslaved, and what happened to them." Here, readers will be able to search through approximately 2,000 individuals' testimonies and browse them by categories such as gender, region of origin, life event type (e.g. travel, emancipation, etc.), and the modern country name where events occurred. Each person's entry includes a timeline of their life history, a downloadable image of their testimony, and metadata for both the individual and their testimony. Because Freedom Narratives is a work in progress, not all of the testimonies are online as of this writing, but this project shows great promise. Freedom Narratives is directed by Paul Lovejoy, Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History at York University in Toronto. [JDC]

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PhotoRec is a data recovery tool for severely damaged digital media. It was originally designed to recover pictures from dying digital camera memory but has since been extended to work with over 480 different types of files on nearly any kind of digital media. PhotoRec works by scanning the entire disk from beginning to end looking for files. This approach, referred to as file carving, is why PhotoRec can work even when the underlying media is severely damaged, when the filesystem metadata has been corrupted, or even when the media has been reformatted. The How PhotoRec works section on PhotoRec's website goes into more technical detail on this process. The PhotoRec step by step section gives a detailed walkthrough of the recovery process with screenshots and explanations of each step. The PhotoRec site provides executables for Windows, macOS, and Linux. PhotoRec is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License, with source code available alongside the executable downloads. [CRH]

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Booktype is a web-based publishing platform that can produce books, reports, and manuals in both digital and print formats. Booktype's authoring environment is designed to be clean and intuitive, using a drag-and-drop approach for formatting and images. Multiple authors and editors can be simultaneously working on a publication, supporting a rapid pace of revisions. Booktype was originally created to support FLOSS Manuals. Currently, it is used by Amnesty International, the German publisher Mikrotext, the Research Hive at the University of Sussex, among others. A larger list of current users can be found under the Who's using it? section of the Booktype website. A public demo is also available for users who want to practice with Booktype before installing it. Booktype's web interface works in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Instructions for installing Booktype on one's own server can be located in the Installation section of the Booktype documentation. Instructions are provided for Linux and macOS. A hosted version of Booktype can also be purchased for a monthly fee. Booktype is free software, distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License, with source code available on GitHub. [CRH]

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This resource was last featured in the 08-01-2014 Scout Report and, even though the accompanying exhibit ended in 2014, the digital collections of soldiers' portraits and ephemera from the Civil War are well worth another visit.

The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment was the first military unit consisting of Black soldiers to be raised in the North during the Civil War. This remarkable digital collection from the Massachusetts Historical Society is meant to complement a physical exhibit that was on display in 2014. On the site, visitors can peruse selected portraits of the soldiers who made up the unit, learn about their recruitment, and find out how they served during the attack against Fort Wagner on Morris Island in South Carolina. This last set of materials is quite moving as it contains shots of the men in their dress uniforms and their camp. The site is rounded out by a selection of additional images of the volunteers and images of recruitment ads and enlistment records.

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