CLICK! UH PROFESSORS PUSH HISTORY FORWARD
WITH TECHNOLOGY
NEH Awards Mintz, McNeil $200,000 Grant to Improve Online Teaching
Site
HOUSTON, May 3, 2005 – Breathing life into century-old events
can be a difficult task, as University of Houston History Professor
Steven Mintz knows all too well. The solution, Mintz believes, is
to revive the old events with a new approach, and his foresight
has recently paid off, literally.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Mintz and
his collaborator, Sara McNeil, a specialist in instructional technology
and associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction, a grant this
month to expand their Web site, “Digital History.” The
Web site provides resources and strategies designed to facilitate
history research for middle school, high school and college teachers
and students.
The grant gives Mintz and McNeil almost $200,000 to expand and
enhance the Web site. Their new project, “My History: Students
and Teachers as Historians,” will improve “Digital History”
with two significant additions.
The first innovation will be called “My Inquiries,”
and will give students and teachers access to primary sources on
specific topics, such as the music of the American Revolution’s
patriots and loyalists and the battle of the Alamo. Mintz hopes
this component of his Web site will motivate students to enjoy research
and to become historians.
“We seek to transform students from passive recipients of
knowledge into active researchers,” he said.
The second major feature, “My Exhibitions,” will give
students and teachers the tools to build individualized multimedia
presentations. The database infrastructure that powers this innovative
tool allows users to draw from more than 800 photographs, art works
and digitally stored letters, as well as 500-plus trailers of historically
significant films and hundreds of pre-1923 songs.
“Many teachers lack the resources and support they need
to teach effectively,” Mintz said. “One of our goals
is to provide teachers and students with a wealth of high quality
historical materials from leading archives and museums.”
With 15,000 to 20,000 unique visitors each school day, the Digital
History Web site seems well on the way to accomplishing this goal
by, as Mintz puts it, reaching far more people than could be reached
by a printed book.
“Digital History offers a wealth of history resources for
audiences that range from middle school teachers to university students,
and it is available to the global community totally without charge
or advertising,” said McNeil. “With the online textbook,
multimedia materials, visual histories, and interactive activities,
Digital History provides an extensive selection of learning materials
for all ages as well as all types of learners.”
Mintz, a specialist in the history of families, childhood and slavery,
has been teaching at UH since 1981. He has authored 12 books, most
recently the award-winning “Huck’s Raft: A History of
American Childhood,” which was published in fall 2004. In
addition to receiving the NEH grant, Mintz and McNeil’s Web
site “Digital History,” initially established in 2000,
was also named one of the Top Five Web sites in U.S. History by
Best of History Web sites. It also was selected as one of the best
Web sites for secondary teachers by the International Society of
Technology in Education, and was placed on NEH’s EDSITEment
list of exemplary resources in the humanities.
McNeil and her students in the Instructional Technology graduate
program in the Curriculum and Instruction Department designed the
Digital History Web site and continue to develop both the visual
and multimedia elements. McNeil has been teaching in the College
of Education at UH since 1995 and has received both the University’s
Teaching Excellence Award and the Distance Education Teaching Excellence
Award. She will continue to work with Mintz creating the exhibitions,
chronologies, templates and databases for the Web site, and transforming
the historical content into innovative and exciting hands-on activities.
For more information on the Digital History Web site, visit www.digitalhistory.uh.edu.
About the University of Houston
The University of Houston, Texas’ premier metropolitan research
and teaching institution, is home to more than 40 research centers
and institutes and sponsors more than 300 partnerships with corporate,
civic and governmental entities. UH, the most diverse research university
in the country, stands at the forefront of education, research and
service with more than 35,000 students.
For more information about UH visit
the universitys Newsroom at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.
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