Creating History Documentaries ─ A Step-By-Step Guide to Video Projects in the Classroom

Bring the past to life in your social studies classroom. Creating History Documentaries offers an easy introduction to teachers wanting to challenge their students with creative media. Step-by-step, you and your students will learn all of the techniques of producing a video, including primary source research, scripting, filming, and editing.

The language of Creating History Documentaries is written in a textbook style that is easily read and understood, with skill-building handouts and activities. Your students will learn to conduct research using the latest tools, write narrative scripts that integrate historical facts and documents, and build a project that allows history to come alive.

The book includes how-to information about video cameras, new digital video technology, computer software, online research, sources of historical photographic film and video footage, and much more. A chapter for teachers gives a crash-course in desktop video editing and a glossary of terminology. Suggestions are provided for integrating documentary project time within social studies curriculum, as an interdisciplinary project, or as the basis for an extracurricular club. Students and teachers who are involved in the National History Day competition also will find this guide particularly useful.

Deborah Escobar is a teacher of gifted and talented in the State of New York. She is an expert on using primary sources and technology in the classroom and has been honored with state and national awards and grants for their use. Escobar is an avid writer, and has created both print and Web-based curriculum for the New York State Archives and New York State Museum. As a teacher, she has been involved in National History Day competition for the past dozen years, and her students have won many state and national awards for their documentaries. She feels that students who have participated in creating a documentary learn lifelong skills in technology, critical thinking, analysis, and research that have far-reaching educational benefits.