The Soundtrack of the Survey, 1865-Present

This guest post comes from former contributor Patrick Iber. Patrick is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he teaches courses in U.S. foreign relations, transnational history, and Latin American culture and politics.  You can read his past posts here.    Like many other professors do, I’ve integrated good deal…

How can we use response software to generate class discussion?

As I’ve written previously, I’ve structured my survey this semester around publicly available primary documents and “clicker” software. This software allows me to sync slides to students’ phones and computers as well as to ask questions in different formats and get immediate responses. This can be obviously be used to generate mini-quizzes: using multiple choice…

Designing a (nearly) free syllabus

By way of brief introduction, as this is my first post, let me say that this semester I will be teaching a U.S. history survey for the first time, at the University of Texas at El Paso. I was trained in Latin American history, and have taught surveys in that subject area. But the U.S.…