Sal Khan on 60 Minutes (Flipping the classroom)

Sal Khan was on 60 minutes tonight talking about his Khan Academy which discusses the philosophy of flipping the classroom which essentially espouses watching 10 minute videos at home and working on assignments in class where the teachers can help the students.  

Depression era Photographs

The Denver Post has this marvelous collection of depression era photographs from the Farm Security Administration Office of War Information and according to the Post "are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs and captions are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color."

Copy and Paste on Your Cell Phone

Another new skill!  The two videos above tell you how to copy and paste - a necessary skill to know. 

Splicd For Showing Parts of Youtube Videos

If you want to show a portion of a Youtube video, all you need to do is to go to Splicd and enter in the url as well as the starting and ending point and you can omit the rest of the video.  For example if wanted to start the video below on the definition of social studies at :20 seconds and finish it at 1:50, this is what you would get with Splicd. 

How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis

The bottom video is a collection of a number of Jacob Riis' pictures narrated with the writing by a reading of his writing (by teacher "Mr. Holt.").  If you would prefer short snippets of his pictures, you can go to NPR and Picture History for individual photos.   The video on top is from the History Channel and tells the story of the impact of the pictures. 

Women's Suffrage

It is appropriate that Marchelle Conway e-mailed me the link to the great video on woman's suffrage today (it's international women's day).  It is by the same group that did Too Late to Apologize.  The other video is the same group's (Soomopublishing) rather nice definition of social studies. 

App Sites for Android and iPhone

One of the questions I often get is where do I get my information.  Well I have a Twitter feed, iGoogle page and Google+.  One of my iGoogle feeds is the "Offical Google Blog" which today announced one place to get all your Google products called Google Play.  For example a few weeks ago I uploaded all 4023 of my songs from my iPod (it took two days on an old computer) and now I can get them on my phone, any computer or tablet on Google music (as opposed to using the iCloud which limits you to being used on Apple products).  But I digress!  If you go to Google's site for Android apps, you can find all of their apps and narrow it down by using the search engine.  Here is the site for Apple's iPhone apps. 

Autosummarizing

One of my teacher-students, Jerry Walsh, just told me about "autosummarizing" which literally summarizes a long passage.  This might work well if you have your students go to a Wikipedia page that has much more information than you want.  I, of course, do not want something downloaded on my computer like Microsoft Word, so I found Tools4Noobs which does the same thing for free. For example here is a Wikipedia passage on Campaign Finance and here is the Tools4Noobs summary. Obviously you would have to look at it yourself first to see if it kept your most important parts, but it's worth a try. 

Google Map for Educators

Really cool clip showing how to use google maps. Shows you how to do a number of cool things like measuring the distance of a lake or a desert.

Civil War Battle Apps

Here are civil war battle apps for Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Little Round Top and Bull Run.  You can use them to visit the sites or to take a virtual tour or to hear lectures from experts. 

The Civil War at 150

The WashPost is continuing to write an amazing series on the "Civil War at 150." Today they released a new section on the "Innovations of War."  Here, for example is a story on the Monitor and the Merrimac. If you haven't see the series you will now have an amazing addition to your digital library for Civil War items. 

Quizlet

Choose a Study ModeScatterLearnFlashcards

Study these flash cards

Quizlet is a site that allows students to create their own flashcards.  It then will shuffle them and allow you to see the front and the back.  If your students are using the site to study, just know that many of the cards were done by students so there might be a mistake or two.  Nonetheless if you broke a unit into parts for different groups, you would have a nice set when you were done wit the unit.  Above is one on the Progressive era. 

50 Sites To Help Your Teaching

50sites ver3

View more presentations from David Kapuler
I will be going through this site soon, but again here is an amazing list of sites that could help you. 

App Search Engine for Educators

I found this from a Google+ post from Judy Arzt.  It is called APPitic and is a search engine for apps for education.  It has both free and paid ones as well as ones for Apple and Android products.  I will be going through here over time and featuring some of what I find, but if you want to beat me to the punch, have at it! 

The History Place

This is a great site that focuses on American history from the colonial period to the present with short secondary readings, timeliness, and photographs. I used their readings on genocide in the 20th century for my world 10 class. It also has a good section on Nazi Germany.