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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Powerpoints for the American Pageant
Here is a powerpoint for every chapter of the book and could easily be adapted for other textbooks.

Online Textbook Videos
Glencoe has a new Causes of the Civil War - Present textbook coming out. The book has an amazing array of supplement online ancillaries, but for my money the videos (several each chapter) are great (and short).

Blogging

Blogging, henrico

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Webpage Making for Teachers and Students
I have received a number of inquiries into how to make teacher and student blogs. You can see that I use blogspot.com, but there is a newer site, wordpress.com which has one additional advantage in that is allows you to upload documents for your students. Blogspot, though, has a bunch more add-ons. Both have tutorials in how to set them up. However here is one that I wrote which tells you how to set up a webpage and how to set up an aggregator. An aggregator lets a person list a bunch of websites and tells you when they have been updated. This way there is no need to type in a url. This is handy if you want your kids to turn in assignments. The blog feature allows you to make comments and you can set it so that only e-mail addresses you want can see the site so that students can have their work protected. I had my regulary world history students do this writing assignment and it worked rather nicely. Now another idea is to have one page and have your students add entries as is done here. If you want to see an example of wordpress and how it is used for class assignments, go here. If you want to go further with all this, read this book.

Mini Historical Movies by NBC
NBC News has created a free, educational website called iCue which is AMAZING. I will be showing a lot of these to my students as they are 2-3 minutes on almost every major point you will touch on this year. It is set up following the standard US history outline and then subdivided into 10-15 videos a page. You can use a link directly to a specific page (from your PowerPoint or blog) or e-mail yourself a specific video and get the link for that one (there is no other way to get it). I really think http://www.howstuffworks.com/ is great, but this is a step up as it is both better quality and nice and short.

A Tremendous Unit on Slavery from PBS
This site has podcasts (short ones), diary entries, great (sad!) stories, historical overview, a year in the life and more. The topics covered include religion, the family, slave life, education, freedom and more.

Great Site for Teaching Ideas
In my perfect world, all my students have laptops (and thanks to cloud computing, they would be inexpensive ones) and I could serve more as a facilatator. In that world, I would produce assignments such as these found here. This is a great site for many reasons. 1) it connects to many terrific pages which have videos, pictures, ect. 2) it allows a teacher to let the kids go and work in small groups where help is needed. 3) it is a good example of what you can do with Edublog which allows (notice the student names on the left side of the linked page) students to put their work in one place (whether you want them to blog is irrelevant). Edublog allows you to upload documents (an advantage over Blogspot where this blog is housed) and have easy to get tabs to follow student work. In short, it is an example of teaching in the Internet age.