The Events in History Blog provides students with an opportunity to blog about an event in history from many different angles.
Before moving forward, let me have you all access and scroll through The Vietnam War Blog for just a second. To view the blog in its entirety, be sure, when you get to the bottom of each page, to click where it says "older posts."
As you can see from scrolling through the blog, this blog consists of many different sections, each section providing students with an opportunity to explore the Vietnam War from a different angle.
There's, for example, something called the interview section, and the video conference section, and the story worth sharing section. Many other sections too.
I'm now going to describe each of these sections for you.
The interview section of the blog provided students with an opportunity to conduct interviews of San Marino teachers and residents that lived during the war
Various individuals interviewed by the students included:
- Bill Mann - an SMHS Computer Applications teachers and one who served on a destroyer during the Vietnam War. In the interview, Mr. Mann described what it was like coming home from the war. "Nobody thanked you," he said. "Nobody cared that you were in the service. It was just a thankless war."
- Scott Barton - a resident of San Marino who was 13 years old and living in Vietnam at the time of the Tet Offensive. In the interview, Mr. Phan recalled how his family had left their house at the start of the offensive, staying with his grandparents a mile away in a home protected by sandbags. Mr. Phan returned some weeks later to bullet-pockmarked walls in his own home.
- John Ly - a San Marino resident and father of Ben Ly, the student who conducted the interview. In the interview, father Ly told his son about what it was like to live just outside of Saigon when American helicopters fired down onto the enemy. It looked like the American helicopters "were peeing," he said.
- Dan Clarke - also a resident of San Marino. Mr. Clarke described how he too was able to escape the draft, by going to college and serving in the reserves. Mr. Clarke closed off the interview by describing how after the war he went into the Air Force and ended up flying turboprop planes onto the deck of aircraft carriers.
- Don Phan - also a resident of San Marino and one who was 13 years old and living in Vietnam at the time of the Tet Offensive. In the interview, Mr. Phan recalled how his family had left their house at the start of the offensive, only to return to bullet-pockmarked walls. Thereafter, Mr. Pahn was raised outside of Saigon by his grandparents, in a home that was surrounded and otherwise protected by sandbags.
- Rick Caldwell - also a resident of San Marino. Mr. Caldwell not only served in the army during the Vietnam War but won a Purple Heart. Mr. Caldwell brought the following items to his interview: many great photographs of his time in Vietnam, his silver steel pot (aka his helmet), his wallet, various letters that he received from his family, etc.
- Jim Schuman - also a San Marino resident and recipient of a Purple Heart Award. Mr. Schuman describes in harrowing detail a night of battle that neither he nor the reader will ever forget.
For the sake of the interview, students were required to use the StoryCorps smartphone application program.
If you haven’t yet heard about this and/or had your students use the StoryCorps app, I can’t recommend it highly enough. To learn more about the StoryCorps App, click on the below
Let’s Make History . . . By Recording It (a TED-Ed Lesson)
A TED-Talk: By David Irsay, the Founder of StoryCorps.
Here’s how the Rick Caldwell interview ended up looking. To give you an idea of how it sounded, I’m now going to play a few seconds of the interview.
Click here to hear the Rick Caldwell Interview.
Side Note:
The below contains some of the photographs along with photographs of some of the items that Mr. Caldwell brought to the interview.
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| Rick Caldwell |
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| Interviewer Courtney McCall wearing Mr. Caldwell's helmet |
Another section of the blog, the story worth sharing section, provided students with an opportunity to tell a story that relates to an iconic photograph taken during the Vietnam War.
Here’s one iconic photo, the Kent State shooting.
And here's another, Muddy Tears.
Here’s more, this one called Flower Child.
And here’s probably the most famous of all, it’s called Burst of Joy.
Each of these photographs (student-generated research revealed) had great stories behind them, stories that are definitely worth sharing
To tell these stories, the students were required to use Google Slides to produce the script. The script then had to be submitted to plagerism.com, with scripts receiving a score 90% or better in terms of uniqueness then turned into a Movenote presentation. Completed Movenote presentations were then uploaded to the SMHS TED-Ed Club Channel.
Here’s how the Burst of Joy presentation looked when completed.
Click here to hear the interview.
And here’s how the Flower Child presentation turned out.
Click here to hear the interview.
Another section of the blog provided students with a chance to engage in a video conference with someone who lived during the Vietnam War.
This is a photograph of Natalie Lortz, an SMHS student who recently video conferenced with Miki Nyguen. And who is Miki Nyguen . . .
The answer can be found in an excerpt from the movie Last Days in Vietnam. This excerpt is entitled One by One - We Jumped Out.
Click here to view the video clip One by One - We Jumped Out.
Side Note:
If you haven’t yet experimented with video conferencing technology, it’s a great way to get your students to connect with:
- People discussed in the textbook
- Book authors and/or journalists
- Museum curators and/or staff
- Subject matter experts
- Students from other schools
- Adults willing to hear student end-of-term presentations
Another section of the Vietnam War blog provided students with a chance to not only answer a fundamental question about the war but to also see how others answer that question.
The question - Do you believe that sending Americans to Vietnam was a mistake?
If you haven't yet used Poll Everywhere and want to learn about some great ways to use this live-time-survey-application program, you might want to take a look at an article I wrote last year for the Poll Everywhere website. The article is entitled Great Ways to Use Poll Everywhere.
Click here to view the article Great Ways to Use Poll Everywhere.
Another section of The Vietnam War Blog that I want to focus your attention on is the section that provided students with an opportunity to write a letter to the class with the student-letter-writer assuming that he/she had lived in Vietnam during an important time in the war.
As you can see from the text appearing on the slide above, the letters that the students wrote came from a number of different perspectives, as well as from a number of key points in the war.
The two final sections of the blog that I want to direct your attention to . . . one provided students with an opportunity to write a review of a movie that is set during the Vietnam War . . .
The other section provided students with an opportunity to review a book that describes the war.
Side Note:
The book Nam Moi was written by San Marino resident Charlene Lin Ung and describes how Charlene, then known as Nam Moi, and other members of her family managed, under the cover of darkness, to escape Saigon in November of 1978.
Their goal - to reunite with the four oldest children sent ahead to the United States, but first, they must evade ruthless communist patrols and otherwise overcome a number of other life-threatening obstacles.
The book is subtitled A Young Girl’s Story of Her Family’s Escape from Vietnam
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