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.

Interactive Maps
Writing this blog page has allowed me to completely redo my US course. This is one of the reasons. This link (when you get there it is at the bottom of the page) allows you to see 100 different historical maps as well as zoom in and out and then have to answer questions.

Yet Another Course Online, with a Twist
This course offers a narrated powerpoint of every part of US history. It might serve as a good supplement if a student misses a class or for homebound students. As an added bonus, if you click here, you can find links for every part of US history which might help you populate a Power Point or create a webquest of find pcitures for your students.

Ken Burns - The Civil War
I remember when I used two televisions to record just the parts I wanted from this magnificient series. Now you can pick and choose what you want from the many clips that are out there. To sort through it all, here is an index of the sections.

Lots of Useful Maps/Pictures on US Wars
If you go here, you can get powerpoints of mostly pictures and maps of troop actions for the American Revolution, Mexican-American War, The Frontier Years, the Civil War, Spanish-American War and WWI.

Origin of the Thanksgiving Day Holiday

Did you know that the author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was behind the US making Thanksgiving a national holiday, that Lincoln was the president who initiated this, that there is no proof that turkey was actually eaten on the first Thanksgiving. So many nice tidbits in this video and more of the story here.

Test Questions for US History
These are four stemmed questions. I sometimes have my students print out the responses to online questions so I know they did it or even just the answers. If you use the online textbook (earlier in this blog), the kids really can never say they left their book at school!

Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin
So I wanted to be able to show my students how slavery spread, especially after the invention of the cotton gin. The map above is what I found. You can change the dates and watch the increase of the slave population even after legal importation of them had stopped. Speaking of Whitney, here is a nice flash image of how the cotton gin works.

Wiki Notes for "American Pageant"
These outline notes go along with the AP book mentioned above, but could be used for other courses. Please leave messages telling me if you like these as we use a different book here at my school.