Do you want to add a touch of Kami-magic to your Social Studies classroom? In this video, you’ll learn how to:
- Use Kami for your Social Studies students
- Create classwork for your curriculum
- Provide effective feedback in real-time or your own time
From studying historical texts to drawing maps and completing worksheets, Kami has the tools you and your students need for the social studies classroom.
Let’s start from a teacher’s perspective. When studying lengthy materials, it can be useful to assign readings in smaller sections. You can achieve this with the Split and Merge Tool where you can edit existing resources, delete pages, you don’t need, shuffle pages around, and even add new pages to create new material for your class.
Students can use Kami to annotate markup and engage interactively with the reading material. In this example of a high school history lesson, students need to close read this chapter from the Odyssey. They can use the Markup Tool to highlight or underline critical sections of the text. They can use a Dictionary Tool to look up definitions to help their reading comprehension. For learners who prefer to have words read out loud, they can use the Text To Speech Tool…
…track a waggon road…
and use advanced controls to navigate their way through the text. The Text Box tool is perfect for leaving text on the document. It’s easily customizable with a Rich Text Editor, and even gives your students the ability to voice type their text annotations. Students can use the common tools to answer questions, express their thinking, and open discussions with the teacher or their class. They can achieve this in the form of Text, Voice, Video, and Screen Capture comments.
Next, let’s take a look at another task. In this example of a middle school lesson, students are learning about the journey of Alexander the Great, they need to plot the route he travelled on a map and indicate the locations of significant battles. Using the Add Media tool, students can insert a map of Alexander’s Empire. They can do this by uploading an image from their computer, Google Drive, or using the built-in Google image search. Once you’ve chosen the source, simply click anywhere on the document to drop the image. Then click-and-drag the corner to resize. Text comments would be perfect to indicate the locations of significant battles. This way they mark locations on the map while keeping labels on the side for a more organised workflow. Students can then draw a route on the map using the Drawing Tool. They can choose from a range of colours and adjust the brushstroke to. To show their work, students can use the Screen Capture Comment tool. This enables screen recording to be embedded into their Kami document:
…towards Asia Minor fighting the first battle here in Granicus. And he moved his way in flat the next major battle in…
Kami is your go to for giving effective feedback. Let’s go back to the teacher view to see how you can support students in real-time. Here’s our students screencapture comment from earlier. You can play it back, review their work, leave feedback, and even link to resources. You can even have the video playing while annotating. Save your most used annotations, phrases or feedback in the annotation bank. You can store text, comments and even stickers for quick and easy access.