Bringing the past to the present isn’t always about colourizing an image or video to remind ourselves and our students that the world of the past wasn’t literally black and white. While superimposing the present onto the past through technology sometimes paints a past event to life, applying the present to the past can work too.
Operating on an aspect, idea, or attitude of our own lives can be problematic when trying to understand motivations, actions, and beliefs of yesterday, with that being said however, if we are cautious about what is being applied, contemporary metaphorical or analogous comparisons can be quite useful, relevant, and pretty fun. Enter the Star Wars Intro Creator:
https://brorlandi.github.io/StarWarsIntroCreator/
This online template based presentation allows you to enter in the necessary info including your variation of “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”; which episode number you’d prefer (great for ongoing lessons), the lesson title, and finally the body describing where the story is picking up from. I’ve found it to particularly fun to use as review to get students back into thinking about the events of whatever period concerned. It works particularly well with any unit/lesson dealing with rebellion and revolution and can segue into discussions about which historic character is most like Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker/Princess Leia or what have you.
The file can be dowloaded for free but you may have to wait a little bit for the team to put it together for you (sometimes over a month), however you can give a minimum $5 donation to get the file in a matter of hours. They do however let you sample/test the template once for free and the page can always be reloaded…
The following is a link to mine:
http://brorlandi.github.io/StarWarsIntroCreator/#!/AKVwS9w9JP4WhFKMNR1D
