USU part of national flag project
INDIANAPOLIS – Under Secretary of Agriculture Joseph J. Jen announced today (June 8), in collaboration with Utah State University Extension, the release of “Growing a Nation: the Story of American Agriculture,” a CD-ROM for American history teachers. The announcement was made at the Agriculture in the Classroom National Conference in Indianapolis.
The interactive multimedia CD-ROM utilizes innovative technology that links to online teacher resources and complements existing American history textbooks and high school history curricula, said Debra Spielmaker, project director and associate Extension professor at USU.
Spielmaker said the program was carefully designed to support national standards for teaching American history. Educators can use the program to teach about agricultural innovations, research and inventions that have positively changed and influenced the lives of all Americans, their culture, economy and quality of life.
The project began when Joseph J. Jen, under secretary for research, education and economics for the USDA, saw a program on the history of Utah agriculture that Spielmaker collaborated on in 2002. Jen asked Spielmaker if the same type of program could be used to tell the story of American agriculture.
The result: the “Growing a Nation” project was conceived and now, 18 months later, is ready for classroom use.
“We thought we could go to USDA and just access print-based agricultural histories to give us a start on the project,” Spielmaker said. “But we found there were really no compiled resources. We realized we would have to start digging through hundreds of resources to get what we needed.”
The complex undertaking involved writing an original history of American agriculture, then illustrating it with hundreds of pictures from collections at the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives, Library of Congress and a multitude of other government agencies.
“We even bought old, out-of-print books on agriculture from eBay to find the pictures we needed,” Spielmaker said.
In order to make sure the immense project utilized the latest educational technologies, Spielmaker subcontracted the instructional design and multi-media development for the CD-ROM to LetterPress Software, an award-winning educational software company and technology partner located on Utah State University’s Innovation Campus.
LetterPress developers built the program using an innovative, technology-based teaching template it had previously used to create a series of American history programs called “Exploring America.”
“This design for teaching history allows teachers to engage their students, through the use of essential historical questions, in exploring and discussing how agriculture has influenced important historical events,” said Mark Lacy, senior vice president of new product development at LetterPress Software. “As teachers present the program, they and their students gain enduring understandings of how agriculture has shaped our nation’s history.”
The “Growing a Nation” project has the potential to reach up to five million students each year, said Spielmaker. Although the historical information is designed to coincide with 8th and 11th grade history curricula, one of Jen’s goals for the project was to inform the general public about how Americans live differently, and how agriculture has made a tremendous contribution to the quality of American life.
Users can learn the history of America through the CD program. It is taught through agriculture, and since agriculture has a relationship to nearly everything, users will also learn the history of the United States, Spielmaker said. The USDA hopes the CD might eventually end up in the Smithsonian as a history-teaching resource, she concluded.
As a CD-ROM, the program technology brings history to life, said Leston Drake, president of LetterPress Software. It uses music, dramatic audio narration, images and various sound effects. It also links to the Internet for additional information.
CD copies can be obtained through state Agriculture in the Classroom representatives. State representatives are listed on the Agriculture in the Classroom Web site at http://www.agclassroom.org/state/contacts/index.htm. Debra Spielmaker is the Utah representative and can be reached for training and further information for Utah teachers at debras@ext.usu.edu.