To create an exciting and educational environment for her honors class, history teacher April Walton will be editing and publishing a history blog for her 8th period U.S. History class. This history blog will include several articles written by her four students in the class.
“It’s a way of showcasing and archiving the work of my US History 2 honors students,” Walton said. “Each week to every two weeks there will be new posts on different events in US history from Pre-Columbian times to today.”
This history blog will be named “Yawping on the Ops.” The history blog will cover a long and significant period throughout American history and will heavily focus on the aspects of history that are overlooked, watered down, never mentioned, and censored.
“I had to pivot a few times in this class, as I only have four students,” Walton said. “I wanted a class that would be engaging for four students, while also making it challenging as it is an honors class. It is difficult to have a traditional lecture class with four students that is engaging and exciting. I also cannot take all the credit, our new Dual Enrollment US. History 2 instructor, Charlie Davis, is the one who gave me the idea. Now with this journal, my students can write on what interests them, in addition to challenging them to write more academically.”
There is a four-step process to publishing and finalizing a story on this history blog. First, the teacher will provide the students with the main event they are writing about, such as the current topic in their class, which is British North America. Next, the students will then read about their topic and formulate a thesis. After, the students in the class will write their stories, collaborate on their stories, and edit each other’s stories. Finally, the teacher will read over each story and give her approval.
“For the history blog I will be publishing stories on the time periods that we are going over in class and more about the negative things that aren’t really talked about in that period,” junior Kiari Walsten said. “As of right now I’m writing about slavery in British North America in 1715.”
According to Kiari, the most challenging part about publishing to the blog is making sure she does not ramble on too much about that topic, because there is a lot of information that she uses.
“In an all I would like to mention that this work is a lot easier on students than just handing out papers because we get to pick our own topic and write about it and it is more of our choice of all the information that is in it,” Walsten said. “I’m looking forward to informing people about what was going on during these times.”
The website to access this article is https://yawpingopsjournal.wixsite.com/historical-journal-o. The website is made with Wix, meaning to access the blog, readers will need to type in the entire URL.
