Today in History

One of the teachers in my department likes to put up a sign by his door each day with what happened on each day in history.  I find that I read it as I do my department rounds each morning.  Since I obviously love the Internet, here is the Library of Congress' "Today in History" which you and your students can see each day. I found it from a Tweet from www.teachinghistory.org. 

NY Regents Test Prep

We have been going through our state's exams and so have been looking all over for review materials.  Here is a great breakdown of all the parts of American history with 15-20 questions for each part.  Look for the multiple choice questions on the lower right side.  There are other items on the review page as well.  Here are two Regents exams a year for the last seven years which are good for review for your students. 

Howard Zinn's Book Free Online

I have been looking for summer assignments for US history and came across two that dealt with Howard Zinn that ask the students to purchase the A People's History of the US and then answer a bunch of questions.  Of course, I say skip the purchase of the book and go here for the entire text free online. 

US History in Eight Minutes

 
History of the US in Eight Minutes
This actually would be a great way to review as the year goes along or even at the end of the year. Our state exam uses pictures on many of the questions and many of these would probably be fair game. I found it on Russell Tarr's Twitter Feed.

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.

National Jukebox

This is pretty cool. I am sitting here listening to a 1903 recording of the Stars and Stripes (push the arrow above to hear it yourself) by the John Phillips Sousa band.  That and 10,000 other historical recordings from 1900 to 1925 are available here on the National Jukebox site which is one of the main things that you can find at the Library of Congress.

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. 

PowerPoint Palooza

PowerPoint Paloooza
This site is one of the most visited sites for US history teachers on the Internet. It is mostly visited for its wonderful PowerPoints that you can download and adapt to your own class as well as a ton of useful links. The New York based teacher also is continually updating the site.

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. 

Korean War

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. 

Lbrary of Congress Cartoons

The Library of Congress has tons of political cartoons online which you might find useful in your classroom.

Hiroshima 1946

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

CNN News

Certainly this is not something you would use everyday in US history, but Student News is a daily feature of CNN.  With Bin Laden likely in the news and 9-11 such a big period of US history, this might be a feature (see above), you will want to occasionally use in the future.