The Advantages of College

Yes, I know not everyone is going to go to college - or should, but I like to connect it to the increased likelihood of success in life for my students or in some cases just graduating as opposed to not for some of them.  Well, yes, this is biased since it is put out by the College Board, but it does look at an amazing array of statistics such as voting rates, exercise enhancement, donations to charity, more activities with your children, less likely to be obese or smoke, etc., etc. and of course generally more income!

History Film Reviews Galore!

The American Historical Association has recently put together a really wonderful list of historical films and their associated reviews. The list also includes relevant articles related to the films and/or subject matter.

While I've certainly had my problems with the simplistic treatment of historical films as either accurate or inaccurate, the AHA has really provided us with a wonderful resource here.

(x-posted at US HIstory Teachers Blog)

Famous Voyages

Map Site Traces Famous Voyages
If you want to show your students the voyages of Magellan, Columbus, Lindbergh's flight to Paris, DeSoto, the Silk Road, Marco Polo and others, this site is a great one. It also includes pictures and descriptions which you can see as you make the follow the voyages. By the way, I found it on a Delicious.com site. Delicious allow you to bookmark online so you can get to your links from any computer and it also shows you what others who have bookmarked the same sites are looking at.

Sporcle

Fellow blogger Frank Franz (Panthers Fan) told me about this at a meeting we attended a few days ago.  Sporcle has some great timed review games and allows you to create your own.  Frank and I were talking about having students do essay re-writes and what should be done with the kids whose first essay is pretty good and having them create a review game was his answer.  

Cr-48 Google Cloud Computer

Initially I had hoped to have "won" a free one of the above laptops, but it will be my next one this summer (think Acer is going to produce it).  If you are a fan of Internet (cloud computing) only computing, it will be the perfect computer for you as it will be cheap, fast and turn on and be online in just a few seconds.  What's the catch - it will only have a little bit of hard drive (enough to run e-mail, download some things before you upload them onto the web).  Being completely on the cloud WILL be the future. By the way, I got a reminder of this innovation from The Innovative Educator. 

Language Started in Africa?

One of the items I teach in World History is that man started in Africa and moved outwards.  Well, while it is controversial, one mathematician looked at the world's languages and "founds that languages tend to be less diverse, with fewer phonetic sounds" the farther one gets from Africa with those in Hawaii having the least.  There is more to it in the article, but basically the author contends that this is further proof of our African roots. 

Pagination in Google Docs

Okay, so perhaps it is not earth shattering, but while I love Google Docs, one of the short comings for me has been that you could only see the pagination view if you went to the print preview. Well starting today, it shows up just as it would in any Microsoft document and if you want to see it as a continuous page, then you simply need to go to "view" and then "document view" and "compact."  Now if GD could just have a way to combine boxes in a chart, then it would be perfect.  

Aztecs

If you want a succinct and very clear video on the confluence between the Spanish conquistadors and the Aztecs, go no further than the History Channel video above.  Here is another on Aztec pyramids. 

Geography Games

Geogames is a new site (that I found on FreeTech4Teachers) that allows you to see if you have learned your geography by dragging countries, rivers, mountains, etc. onto a blank space (or a country depending on where one starts).  You can also print out your results. 

E-mail to Text

Kids do not seem to use e-mail anymore other than to send a teacher a message, but never to retrieve one!  So if you want to send an e-mail to their cell phones, here is how you do it:

Sprint	phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon	phonenumber@vtext.com
T-Mobile	phonenumber@tmomail.net
AT&T	phonenumber@txt.att.net

So if the number is 571222333, you would e-mail to "571222333@messaging.sprintpcs.com" for Sprint. I found this info here.

Many Sites for World History

This site breaks up world history into modern and ancient and gives both lots of categories as well as subsets.