This week began with an orientation meeting with Dr. Snyder and my fellow-intern Stephen over Zoom, during which Dr. Snyder explained to us the general goals of the program, outlined our responsibilities, and helped us to understand our future schedules. Each of us will be assigned one class from the HIS4150 History and Historians course with roughly twenty students in each. We will be responding to any questions students may have about assignments, material, etc. as well as helping them with their drafts. Upon receiving a draft and depending on each student’s preference, we may need to schedule a meeting over Zoom to go over a student’s draft in real time or email back a student’s draft with our suggestions that we can leave using Track Changes and Comments features in Microsoft Word. Dr. Snyder told us that we were only the third and the fourth History Lab interns ever, so she encouraged us to keep an open mind about it and share any ideas we may have.
Dr. Snyder also clearly outlined our expected time commitment as well as shared different tips on how to manage our schedules effectively. On average, Dr. Snyder expects us to commit ten hours a week, but she also emphasized that weeks with an approaching assignment deadline can be more intense than others, so she encouraged us to study our assigned course’s syllabus, use our own judgment, and plan accordingly. While Stephen and I should aim for a twenty-four-hour turnaround, we can take up to forty-eight hours to review drafts if we receive many requests at once, but Dr. Snyder expects us to notify her in such cases, so that she can inform the class. Based on Dr. Snyder’s experience, more students reach out with questions about their drafts after they receive their first grades, which means that now we can focus more on brainstorming ideas and creating content for the History Lab.
Content creation is another goal of this internship and an essential part of our final project or end-of-semester “deliverable.” Although Dr. Snyder does not have specific requirements or expected minimums, she encouraged us to use this internship as an opportunity to enrich our portfolios and resumes with individually created material as much as we can. She also pointed out how our current positions as students can aid us in this task - the challenges and confusions are still fresh in our memories (and some, perhaps, are still present), and we can better address them in the content we create. While discussing this, Stephen remembered that note-taking was something he sought additional information about, and I recalled that long historiography articles frequently overwhelmed me until I finally learnt how to read, or rather skim, strategically. Dr. Snyder offered us an opportunity to address these and other difficulties history students face using various digital learning tools that can be in turn integrated into the History Lab on UCF Webcourses.
After our meeting, I began searching for online platforms and resources for educators, which could help me and Stephen create accessible infographics, quizzes, and other learning and practice materials. I stumbled upon Sutori - a platform where educators can create customizable “stories” with texts, links, images, videos, and quizzes. I then decided to test different ways in which Sutori can be implemented into the History Lab and first created a short draft that showcased the diversity of historical sources as well as tested students’ knowledge of the differences between primary, secondary, academic, and popular sources (on the right is a section of it). I have shared my draft with Dr. Snyder and Stephen, and we have agreed to confirm that Sutori can be embedded into UCF Webcourses before proceeding further. Stephen, in turn, created a very clear and memorable infographic about historical thinking skills.
To summarize, this week I got a chance to be creative, experiment with different digital tools, and, in the meantime, revisit the material that is essential to anyone aspiring to a career in history.