Tim the Librarian

“When the Spanish reached the valley of Mexico in 1519, they were amazed at what they saw.” – Wood, Tim. The Aztecs. London: Hamlyn, 1992.

Next semester we will begin to look at the Spanish Conquest of the Americas in history at Year 8. The starting point for all resources is, of course, the Victorian Curriculum. But you would be forgiven for looking for something more interesting or approachable. Alternatively, you can go straight to the source as RZI intends to do and wade into 420 pages of primary material. Whichever way you start, there are ways that the library can help you in regards to resources and skills.

The Spanish began visiting the Americas many hundreds of years before ClickView. I don’t even think YouTube was a thing back then. And even though our compactus was probably already full by 1492, I don’t think anything about the ‘conquest’ has made it in there since. So where to start?

On the shelf

The library has a small collection of books on the Americas that are mainly located on the shelf at 972 (History of the Middle Americas).  This includes books that cover pre-Columbian life, the Aztecs and Tenochtitlan.

Because there are so few of these, we can’t rely on each student getting their hands on one. But we can provide them with photocopies on relevant chapters (under copyright, we are allowed to make copies of one chapter or 10 per cent of each work).

Britannica

The next best thing (because we pay for access to it) is Britannica Online. Students can access this from school or home using the link in Simon. The good thing about Britannica is that you can select the level (Primary, Middle or High) of information being retrieved.

Google

Our kids will be way ahead of us in googling this. They will search for ‘the Spanish Conquest of the Americas’ or they will jump right in with the assignment question or some keywords (probably names).

We will need to come up with some clever tasks that will require them to do something with the information that they find if we are to avoid ctrl+c, ctrl+v answers. Once again, the curriculum can be of help here, along with Bloom’s question stems.

Flip it

To get the kids interested and give them some background information, as well as to teach skills throughout their journey, we can provide them with content that they can watch from home. This allows them to chill out with their headphones on after school with a legitimate excuse and makes us on hand to help out while they do their homework in class.

Aside from the huge amounts of content on this topic on YouTube and the Khan Academy, there are videos on the subject available on ClickView. Check out this video on the Waldseemüller map, for example. Skip to Chapter 10 to begin at Columbus’s big mistake.

Blood and guts

While elements of this story are undoubtedly gory, there are many ways to interest the students without labouring this side of it – they were real people who were sacrificed after all.  Pre-Colombian societies had some marked similarities and differences between other indigenous cultures including Australia’s. This can be an opportunity to explore where the came from and when and how they got to the Americas as well as an opportunity to explore: the notion of ‘civilisation’, myths attached to indigenous lifestyles and the way these came about.

The subject of how to manage first contact between societies is also still very much an issue. Finally, the way that we are explaining and contextualising colonisation is a big news item in Australia today but is it an issue in the Americas?

With oral presentations coming up, you will need to be pretty dynamite at research in order to stand out from the crowd.

I have chosen (…made up.., ok, stolen…) the topic: Young people should be allowed to drive younger. This is obviously insane. Young people are terrible drivers and, for a range of reasons too great to mention, will be a greater danger to themselves and almost everyone else alive if they are allowed to do so. Luckily, you don’t need to agree with your contention to do a good presentation.

If you want poor results, just ask the question

To gauge the internet’s feeling about this, I waded in by asking Google: ‘Should young people be allowed to drive earlier?

This was the least productive of my searches but, due to the magic of the internet, even bad searches can get good results.

The first answers were totally irrelavent, a couple of hits about elderly drivers, a couple of hits from lazy kids asking debate sites the same question. I’m not after the unfiltered thoughts of internet users, I want a broad overview from a professional writer working for a publisher with a reputation to manage. The sixth result was just that. I was delighted to find an article about lowering the driving age in the UK (“…controversial…”) but then disappointed and a bit surprised to find out that they don’t have what’s known as ‘graduated licences’ (think L plates) and were thinking about lowering the driving age to 16. Bummer.

Keywords and quotation marks

The article mentioned accidents. I thought that would be a good direction for my research so I tried the keyword ‘accidents’ plus the phrase ‘”teenage drivers”‘ (in inverted commas because I only wanted results about teeneagers). This confirmed that teenagers are also horrible drivers in the US. But maybe they are better here in dot au.

Site restrictions

To isolate information from australia I added ‘site:.au’. This returns only pages with an .au URL (accidents “teen drivers” site:.au). You can also do this to get .gov or .edu (or even .pdf for that matter) results. Alternatively, you can remove certain sites by putting a minus in front of them (accidents -.com will no longer return commercial sites, for example). For more awesome search operators, click here.

Unfortunately this confirmed that teenagers are terribly dangerous here as well. I am going to have a tough time making people think I am a good person while arguing that teens should be allowed to kill themselves and others earlier. But maybe if they were shackled to an adult while they are learning, they would be safer (defeating the whole, ‘teens want to be more independent argument’ but anyway…).

Statistics

I searched for ‘rates of accidents for L-plate drivers’. It turns out that this statistic is not so easy to find. In hindsight, I probably should have searched for ‘accompanied’ drivers or tried to find the terminology that road safety authorities use to describe that relationship. I did however find this neat graphic:

My argument is going to need some more work so now I am going to try to find some evidence that stretching the time young drivers spend with a licensed driver increases their safety and then work backwards from there.

Research can be a bit of a twisty-turny process but it can also be the most fun and interesting part of an assignment. Hopefully using these tips will make it moreso!

We have a subscription to Britannica so that students have access to easy-to-find, high-quality reference material from school or home.

From School

Students can access Britannica at school by navigating to the Online Resources page from the Library page on the school website (hopcross > Library > Online Resources) or by clicking this link.

This should take them directly to the levels page where they select the level of information they need based on their reading ability. This link only works while at school.

From Home

The link above only works while the students are at school. From home, students can access Britannica through Simon. The link for Britannica is located at the bottom of the School Links box on the left-hand side of the page under the Library heading (highlighted below).