Saturday, January 31, 2009


Electoral College Back to 1789
Earlier I linked you to this site, but 270towin.com adds in maps which are always nice to show your students.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009






Timeline Popups
This is a nice way to have your students create timelines and it can be done very quickly. The only drawback is that the descriptions are fairly short. Run your cursor over the pictures and the descriptions will appear. To see the entire timeline on the timerime website go here.

Sunday, January 25, 2009


Graphic Organizers
Here are a few good sites to use if you want ideas for graphic organizers and blank sheets.


Thursday, January 22, 2009

And Another Teacher Made Resource of Links
"Ms. Hotz" is clearly very devoted to her students and has provided another very useful resource for research (pictures, stories, videos, etc.) for both students and teachers. The US sources are organized to follow the standard textbook's outline. As an added bonus there is a useful section explaining how to make internet searches (probably explains her success).

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Great Gathering of Internet Resources
My students did a blog project where they had to gather pictures, videos, links, etc. about the causes of the Civil War and then write about each. This site was a great help. It is put together by a neighboring county to mine. Honestly it is so rich, I could probably do do months of blog entries on some of the links.

Thursday, January 15, 2009


With the Obama Inaugural Coming, Here are Others
Above is the first part of Kennedy's speech and here is the second part. To see the videos of all other televised inaugural speeches, please go here.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Keyboardr - Google Search Made Easier and Faster
Keyboardr is a search engine that combines google (both the search engine as well as images) with wikipedia youtube. It really is great. For example, when I searched the term "US history" search results began to appear as soon as I typed the letter "t" and continuously changed until I had fully typed "US history." Probably it will be better as a resource for your students, but if you are having your students create their own blogs (as I am), then it will be rather useful.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Student Blogging
If you liked my earlier piece about how to make blogs, then you might be interested in this. Grading the work students create online is new territory for a lot of teachers. Creating a well written rubric for any assignment can be time consuming even if you are familiar with the medium your students are working in. If you're trying to create a rubric for work students are doing in a new or an unfamiliar medium the task can be downright daunting. But this site has a number of different rubrics for blogging. By the way in case you're not familiar with it, Rubistar from 4Teachers.org is a great place to get ideas for rubrics and create rubrics for a wide range of student work.