Interactive videos and real-life stories

Ask students to bring up comparisons between two countries (i.e. Germany and Italy); rely upon Historiana‘s collections of texts and iconographic resources as a source of learning materials (you can find a list of learning objects repositories here). 

Choose a video to watch with the students; you might want to re-edit it through a software for interactive videos (i.e. PlayPosit) in order to adapt it to your teaching style, add further information through captions, crop it if needed and ask questions or raise discussions relevant to the context of the class.

The video can be a satirical analysis of the most required commodities during the first period of pandemic: pasta and toilet paper. Link the video to some further reflection on the role that food has played in times of crisis, through the analysis of the historical documents offered by the European portal. Look at the war cookbooks and compare them with the recent ebook “Cooking of Resistance”.

At the end of the research, divide the students into small groups, ask them to choose a recipe from old books and to prepare it at home. During the preparation, each student in the group records a step of the recipe, then they collect the single videos together to create a complete video of the recipe. Students should also interview grandparents or other older people to record similar situations in problematic times and compare them with their own experience. This part of the activity makes it more suitable also for younger students.

Together with students, co-evaluate the work of the groups on the basis of a shared rubric.