77 Web Resources

I love going to the site FreeTech4Teachers and will be going through the resource above to see what more I can add to my repertoire.   The resource above is for content delivery, not social studies content, and has many many excellent resources.  You can see a full blown version of it here.

e-books

Two years ago I had the opportunity to pilot online books w. our students and now thanks to some innovative county leaders, we are, as a county, mostly going to e-books next year for our high school social studies classes.  When people ask me why I would want to do so, the video above is one good example from a company called Inkling which works w. McGraw, Pearson and other textbook leaders to produce interactive e-books.  Even better the e-books come with a ton of ancillaries such as links, video, and other "tools in a box" one can teach with interactive ideas using nothing other than the e-book. Throw in the Internet and you are talking about an amazing way to teach.  Also, you can see a competitor of Inkling, called Kno that has some of their own amazing wizardry on their single and double tablets as you can see below. (Thanks to Kleininspiration for the heads up on Inkling)

Overview Videos

This comes from Bill Gates' site and has lots more in math, science, etc.  It does have about 10 15-18 minutes videos (see one above) on European history that would be good for review.

Searching This Blog and I'm Offering A Tech Course This Fall

When I first thought of this blog (and if you are new to it, remember there are three: government, US and world and the links are in the upper right hand corner), I was happy just to be able to get a few posts up (total on all three) each week.  Now I just looked at combined there are 1900 posts in the last three years. So if you are new or want to look for help in your class be it content or technology, just go to the search engine in the upper left hand corner and you should find lots of good things.  In fact, not to be conceited, but I use it all the time as I obviously can't remember all of the posts. 

By the way, if you are in or near Fairfax County, VA, I will be offering a 10 week course on Tuesdays in the fall at the Leis Center (Falls Church) on integrating technology into the classroom with the aim of having you learn by doing how to use all the tools I will show. 

Delicious!
One of the questions I get is how do I find my resources. Well delicious.com is one of the ways. While many people save their bookmarks directly on their computer and others use google, I use delicious. It is great because 1) you can access your bookmarks on any computer anywhere in the world. 2) You can click on a link and see other people who have also saved it. From there you can see what they have found. If you look at the video below this entry, I found it by doing just that. 3) If you want to block others from seeing you (perhaps you can't remember your login codes), you can do just that. Try it and look me up.

School's Not Out For Summer Here

I still have my students until June 20th and then 10 days later start my with my online summer kids, so if you like this blog, you can come here all summer for ideas.

This Day in History

I just found this site on the History Channel that has a 30 second video of what happened on "this day" in history, both in the US and the world.  Adjoining the video is a written explanation. 

Regents Prep Materials

Here is a very nice review page for the NY Regents exam including a ton of multiple choice exams.  Here are all the world history exams going back seven years with two each year.  They are fairly difficult multiple choice questions. 

Chauvet Cave Drawings

If you follow this blog, you know we've done a number of entries on cave dwellings this year. As a high schooler, I was lucky enough to see the now closed Lascaux cave paintings. Yesterday I saw the new movie "Cave of Forgotten Dreams."  It is getting rave reviews, but I would say it is very repetitive and if you want to save your money, go here for a NPR interview w. the creator which gives interesting insights and here to see the main drawings of the Chauvet Cave which holds the oldest known cave dwellings.  The drawings are amazing. 

Flat Maps

Flat Maps for the Classroom

I have to say "flat maps," since Google Maps are so great. But if you want to see traditional maps from every country in the world, you can go to Atlapedia. I found this site on Edgalaxy.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Glogster

One of my college track teammates is doing great tech things at St. Christopher's in Richmond, VA.  Here is a "newspaper" that their middle school kids put together.  What a great example of what can be done in the classroom with Glogster.It includes links, pictures, music and more.

Uses for Google Docs in the Classroom

The slide show above says it is for Google Apps, but everything on it can be done for FREE if you get a Google account.  After doing that, put "Google" in the search engine on this blog site and you will see links to be able to do pretty much everything above. It really has revolutionized what I do in the classroom. 

Anne Frank's House

This is a pretty cool site that shows the inside of the house that Anne Frank hide inside.  It has a narrated tour of each tour.  In the past I have also posted the only known video of Frank which happened to be taken from her looking out the window of the house. Here is the website of the Anne Frank museum.The first link came from a Twitter post from "shellterrell."

Syncing Your Desktop w. Google Docs

Some might call me crazy, but having read three books on the inner workings of Google, I am not at all worried about the company losing my files and have consequently not backed up one file I have made this year.  But for those of you who want to back up your files I just found out about Sync Docs from a blog I follow called The Pursuit of Technology.  What it will allow you to do is to upload an entire folder and from then on it will sync everything you do. The video that explains it is above. 

Mayan Civilization

My parents still use paper and so while I was over there for mother's day yesterday, I noticed their copy of the most recent Smithsonian magazine which has a cover story on El Mirador which was the capital of the Mayan civilization.  Not only is there a long story, but also a number of photos.  So, great you say, I am well past the Mayans.  Since I did not use a PowerPoint for this part of the year I am going to go back to the unit assignment and add these amazing photos and then will go and see work in the reading of the article.

North Korea

This is a short video about the Korean War which I found at FreeTech4Teachers.  I have put a number of these short videos on this site, but you can find them by either using my search engine or going to Youtube.com and looking for short videos on wars. 

Hiroshima 1946

This is a seventeen minute film of Hiroshima in 1946 made by the US Air Force. I found it on Open Culture. 

BinLaden

I like to constantly tie-in what we are doing to today's world.  To help me, I will probably use the Lede which I've mentioned before as it is "reporting on the spot" as it includes items such as the live tweeting from nearby during the attack on Bin Laden was ongoing as well as the raw footage just after it ended and much more of this event and others in the news. 

Medieval Period Website

I must say I am in a bit of a rush to finish for the year as our state exam is in three weeks so we are almost done (but this blog always continues through the entire summer).  Here though is a site that might help you if you do, as do I, world history from pre-history through the Renaissance.