A Google Chat with a Professional

As soon as my history teacher announced that my class would be having a google chat with a textile factory historian, I knew I was in for an interesting class. As exciting as it is learning history from a museum worker in England, it required a lot of preparation.  To start our investigation, we searched the museum website and read the most important articles in order to find out the general background of the textile industry and the MOSI Museum of Science and Industry.  Afterwards, my class watched a video in which Jamie (the professional we had the chat with) explained the general process of turning a piece of cotton into clothing.  We then used our recently learned google search skills to find definitions for the machine terminology Jamie used, so that we would understand when he used those words to talk to us on the video chat.  In groups of five or six, we thought of a bunch of questions about textiles to ask Jamie when we saw him the next day.  The prep work lasted a whole day, but if we hadn't done any of these steps, we would have been unprepared for the chat.

The next day we spent a whole class period on google chat with Jamie. We learned a ton about the textile industry and the lives of people who worked in factories in England during the Industrial Revolution.  I learned that the cottage industry and factory industry were very different from each other.  In the cottage industry, whole families would work together in their homes and use a machine called the hand loom to make clothes.  The women and children would prepare the cotton fibers by brushing them, while the men would do the actual weaving.   Most often, the looms were located in the attic of the house, where the most light could be found.  In contrast, the factory industry was noisy, unpleasant, and dangerous.  Children were hired to do the hard work, and since health and safety procedures didn't exist, many were injured.  They would move away from their safe family homes and work with machines like the water frame and spinning machine, on which they had to be careful not to chop their fingers off on the rollers used to stretch out cotton fibers.  The machines were dangerous enough, but children also had to worry about becoming ill from the terrible working conditions.  As the factory industry grew, industrialization began to progress really quickly, so houses were built fast.  Each house had small living quarters, and there were many families per building.  These appalling conditions, as well as the state of the factories, led many people to get diseases.  Families didn't want to send their kids to the factories, which led factory owners to force orphans to do the work instead.  In addition to learning this fascinating information, my class got to ask the questions we and prepared in class.  The video chat was one of the most interesting activities I have done in history class to date.

This image shows the process of making cloth from cotton, and is from the MOSI Museum of Science and Industry in England, the museum we had the google chat with.
http://www.mosi.org.uk/usercontrols/mosicontrols/thumbnail.aspx?mi=35091601&fn=copy%20of%20img_9306.jpg&w=180&h=198&f=auto-1571&o=1

I truly enjoyed the google chat and definitely hope we do it again with other experts during this school year.  It was amazing that I got to speak face to face with a professional from a textile gallery, and I feel that the information I learned is more genuine than information I have learned in the past.  I learned that history seems a lot more real if someone talks to you about it than if you just read about it out of a textbook.  I don't think I learned more from the chat than I would have otherwise, but I do feel like it was a lot more engaging this way.  I do wish that we had had the chance to go up close to the screen and take pictures of the machinery, because I wasn't able to take any from my position in the room.  Overall though, I really did enjoy the google chat with Jamie and would like to do it again.  Google chatting with an expert is a fun way to learn about history, and was a new experience for me.

Museum Exhibits...Hung up in a High School?

Last week,  I spent most of my time in history class creating a "museum exhibit" about the Industrial Revolution.  To be a museum curator and create interesting exhibits, you must go through many different steps.  I learned that there are multiple steps needed to make an appealing poster.  To start off, my group had to analyze six different sources for our topic: the effect the Industrial Revolution had on the environment.  Next, we created a design for our poster exhibit that tied in to the theme, and printed out our sources and source descriptions.  After we glued the information onto our poster and wrote down a creative title, the exhibit was hung up in the school hallway.  Each of the five exhibits from my class was unique and talked about different contributions to the Industrial Revolution.

This is an image of the exhibit my group made in class.  It featured information on the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution.

My poster was about the environment impact of the Industrial Revolution, but each other exhibit featured a different consequence from the same time period.  The first one I looked at was about child labor and was titled "Comdemning the Innocent."  The title helped me realize that child labor was a harmful consequence of the revolution, and that it was extremely unfair.  I learned that child labor was a big problem because the children were put to work at young ages, the the factory conditions were terrible.  It is depressing that the governments made children work like this, and 49.9% of them started before they were 10.  Lots of children got hurt during work, and some smaller ones had to dangerously crawl around mines.  The thought of child labor makes me sad, and I hope the government never invents a system this bad again.

The next poster, called "Spinning into Slavery," was about another unfair part of the revolution - slavery in the American South.  The title showed me that slaves were needed more frequently throughout the Industrial Revolution, and I learned that as the world became more industrialized, more slaves were required to complete the work needed to produce goods.  It is very sad that instead of having normal people do this work, they had slaves do all of it instead, but it is great that this problem has been fixed since then.  Different sources on this poster show that new machines, like the cotton manufacturer, were built, and the number of textile mills increased steadily during this time period.  The number of slaves went up because they were needed to operate these new machines.  Slavery and child labor were both faults of the revolution, but there were some pluses too.

The title of the exhibit "Spinning a City" told me that spinning was used all over the cities to make everyday things during this revolution.  I learned from the poster that many new inventions were created to increase the production of clothing, and the clothing industry grew rapidly as a result of this.  It is interesting how the populations of many cities, London especially, skyrocketed because of the increase in clothing.  The invention of the spinning loom was the most important invention because  it made the process of making clothing so much faster.  I learned that clothing is very important to a society, and because there were new and productive machines to increase clothing, there was also an increase in population.

The last poster from my history class was titled "Steam Powered Transportation: Now We're Getting Somewhere."  This told me that steam powered vehicles made everything move a lot faster from one place to another during the Industrial Revolution.  Traveling with steam power, especially by train, made everyone more productive in everything they did because they could move around faster instead of traveling by horse and carriage.  It it very interesting that the invention of steam power increased movement of people and helped them travel to less populated areas in America with ease.  For the exhibit, I learned that many people enjoyed traveling faster, and even more productive methods of traveling have bee invented since then.  During the early 1800s the production of the Erie Canal enabled citizens to travel over 363 miles faster.  These canals always connected cities, which wee the most common travel destinations.  Each aspect of the the Industrial Revolution was unique, and each were explained well on the posters we made in class.

The Industrial Revolution: The Key to our Modern Lives

The Industrial Revolution was one of the most important revolutions in the history of Great Britain, and it gradually spread all over the world.  During this time period, many parts of the world became industrialized; life for everyone as they knew it changed, and became more modern and efficient.  Last week, I discovered why life changed so much for people during the Industrial Revolution.  New technology, changes for people, their jobs, and the way they farmed, different resources, and more efficient transportation methods all contributed in making the Industrial revolution 'revolutionary.'  Of those four ingredients to industrialization, the most important two are the changes in people and technology.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/ind_rev/images/IR36GR21x1.jpg

During the Industrial Revolution, citizens everywhere witnessed a change in how they could farm their land and get jobs.  Many factors contributed to the increase in the quantity and quality in food production, such as newly built dikes, which protected the farm land and crops from the pollution of ocean water. People also found why their crops previously weren't able to grow as well - they needed to use fertilizer.  Starting with the Industrial Revolution, farmers used fertilizer from their livestock to renew the soil, and mixed different types of soil to improve crop growth even more.  Crop rotation, which helps the soil renew nutrients, and the seed drill, which lets seeds be grown in rows rather than scattered randomly, were invented.  Also, wool production increased like food production because more pastures for sheep were built.  Along with all of these improvements, there were also some flaws.  Some people began to take over and control land formerly used by peasant farmers, which forced them to move into growing cities start their lives over there.  This was called the enclosure movement.  These peasants found new jobs working machines in factories in the cities they moved to.  Farming for people improved overall during the Industrial Revolution, and so did technology.

Technology changed a great deal during this time period in our history.  Before the Industrial Revolution, things always had to be made at a slow pace, because they were powered by humans and animals.  Thankfully, this changed, and technology became powered with windmills and water mills.  Starting in the early 1700s, energy began to be harvested from coal, which provided the power for Thomas Newcomen to develop the steam engine, that pumped water out of mines.  Later in the century, engineer James Watt improved the steam engine, and this invention became one of the most beneficial in Great Britain.  Iron was needed for the construction of lots of machines, and coal was used as the fuel that produced iron.  In 1709, Abraham Darby discovered the process of smelting iron, or separating it from its ore.  He also found out how to remove the impurities from the coal that damaged iron.  Over time, iron became used more and more often in the construction of different types of machines, and became increasingly common after railroads were used more widely.  New technology, such as using coal and iron to build machines, came to be more widespread during the Industrial Revolution.  Technology and changes in farming and jobs, as well as resources and transportation, played a vital part in industrializing Britain, and helped make society the modern one it is today.

How to Use the Internet With Schoolwork

In my history class, we performed two different activites that were designed to help us find appropriate sources online and find the correct answer to any question by just using Google.  Using the internet responsibly is very important when completing research papers in history because using unreliable or inaccurate sources can lead to false information.  Being able to obtain true information in real life is a vital technique to have, and these two activities can teach anyone how to do it.

http://images.forbes.com/media/lists/companies/google_200x200.jpg

In the first of these activities, my class went to Google.com and searched for A Google A Day, a site run by Google that teaches people how to search effectively and get the right information at the same time (http://www.agoogleaday.com/#game=started).  We were all given a question, and we had to work in groups to find the answer.  Each question contained multiple parts and required many different searches to find the answer to the big question.  Although it was fun finding out the answers to interesting questions, it was very difficult to do so and became frustrating if you couldn't find the correct answer.  By completing this activity, I learned that sometimes it takes multiple searches to find the information you are looking for, and that the information is sometimes not on the first site that pops up.

The second activity was meant to teach us about authentic, accurate, and reliable sources.  To complete this activity, first we defined the words accuracy, authenticity, and reliability.  Accuracy is the state of being correct or precise, and authenticity is when something is real, genuine, not copied, and is what it claims to be.  Reliability is when someone or something can be trusted to provide what is needed.  It is important for the sources you use to be authentic, reliable, and accurate because your information should be true, up-to-date, and trustable.  An example of a website that should never be used as a source for any paper is the website of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/).  This website is not authentic, accurate, or reliable because there is no such thing as a Tree Octopus, so all of the information on the website is fake.  Using the right information and the correct techniques to find information is very important to your work in school.  

Opinions and Goals for the New School Year

Hello, my name is Angela and I am currently a sophomore in high school.  I created this blog for the 2014-2015 school year to write posts for my history class and share my opinions on material from some of our lessons.  In this first post, I will write about my hopes for the incoming school year and what teachers can do to help me learn best.

School-books-laptop
http://iteachwithipads.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/school-books-laptop.jpg

After watching a youtube video featuring John Green (below) in history class last week, I thought more about my education and what I can do to make it better.  I realized that I have always learnt better with some teachers than with others.  In my opinion, teachers are "great" if they allow their students to take notes a lot, give study guides for exams, and listen to their students' feedback on their teaching style.  My favorite teachers from past years did all of those things as well as allowing for extra help when students were struggling before tests.  This year, I would like my teachers to fit my description of "great" and offer help to me if I am having trouble with lessons.  I will definitely have a better learning experience if my teachers have teaching styles that I prefer and they listen to their students.   

In the video I watched, John Green mentions that he supports students in school because they will grow up and eventually benefit their community.  The world needs smart people in it, and those people become who they are through their schools.  I think that if all the students in the world used their education to become great, smart people, then the world would be a better place to live in.  My goals for this school year are to get good grades in my classes and to balance my schoolwork with my activities successfully.  To achieve these goals, I will try not to procrastinate and pay attention to all instructions in my classes.  Any student can have a better school year by getting help from their teachers and following their goals, and they should try to use their education well.