The Teaching History with Technology Newsletter (Fall 2006)

The THWT Newsletter offers resources, lesson plans, and tech tips to help history and social studies teachers incorporate technology effectively into their courses.

The THWT newsletter is produced by Tom Daccord, veteran history teacher, academic technology specialist for the Humanities, webmaster of Best of History Web Sites and Teaching Literature & Writing With Technology, and President of the Center for Teaching History With Technology. A "laptop teacher" who has instructed in a computer environment for the last six years, Mr. Daccord has been featured in the Boston Globe ("Making Tech Connect" December 29, 2003) for his contributions to teaching with technology

editor's note: I am very excited to welcome Justin Reich as co-editor of Best of History Web Sites and Center for Teaching History with Technology. Justin is a wonderfully talented history teacher and a creative technology integrationist . Justin was instrumental in the recent redesign of THWT and has created new sections for both Best of History Web Sites and the Teaching History with Technology.

Welcome to the Redesigned THWT Web Site!
As you probably noticed right away, the Center for Teaching History with Technology web site has undergone a major facelift. We have redesigned the site to make it more informative and accessible for our visitors. You will notice an emphasis on new and emerging technologies such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, and video ipods. In the months ahead we will be offering both podcasts and video tutorials to help you integrate technology into your classroom. We invite you to explore the redesigned site and contact us with suggestions on how we can improve the site further.

New Additions to Best of History Web Sites!
Best of History Web Sites added new sections and pages over the summer. Make sure to check them out! Many thanks to Justin Reich for his help in creating and editing new additions. Thanks also to Henry Foote for his help validating links on older BOHWS pages.

• American History: Vietnam
• Modern History: Hitler
• Modern History: Stalin
• Modern History: Lebanon
• Oral History
  • Discover general oral history sites that explain how to conduct an oral history project as well as actual oral history projects
• History Today
  • This new section features views on current historical topics of interest from liberal, conservative, and international perspectives.You are invited to offer your views on these topics via the Best of History Web Sites user forum.
• Games and Animations
  • Here you will find an annotated list of great history games and animations organized around broad historical periods. Many thanks to Joshua Dale for his help in organizing and developing this new section.

Podcast and Video Tutorials from "Teaching With New and Emerging Technologies: Frameworks, Strategies, and Examples"
Last summer I ran both onsite and online workshops demonstrating how teachers could make effective use of new and emerging technologies. Here are select highlights from the workshops:

• My podcast on Digital Natives, the Web 2.0 (The Living Web), and technology integration in the 21st century:
  http://thwt.org/digitalnatives.mp3

  Note: The MP3 file runs best in iTunes. (Open QuickTime on your computer and select File --> Open URL. Paste the URL above in the box and press Enter/Return.)

• Podcasting in the History Classroom
  • Listen to an except of my "A Day in the Life of a Hobo" radio show: http://thwt.org/hobopodcast.mp3
  • Listen as I explain the project: http://thwt.org/hobopodcast.mp3


• Who can leave comments on your classroom blog? A Video Tutorial

• Teachers, parents, and administrators worry about outsiders leaving inappropriate comments on classroom blogs. In this video tutorial I use the Settings options in Blogger, a free blogging tool, to determine who can leave comments and who can't: http:/thwt.org/blogger5.mov
• Note: The movie plays best on QuickTime, a free media player. The file is large, so please be patient while it loads.

More on teaching with new and emerging technologies in the next newsletter!

Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archive Project
http://www.tellingstories.org/index.html
Visit "Telling Their Stories" and read, watch, and listen to perhaps the best student-created oral history project in the country. High School students at the Urban School of San Francisco have produced three impressive oral history interviews featured at this site: Holocaust Survivors and Refugees, World War II Camp Liberators, and Japanese-American Internees. Urban school students conducted, filmed, and transcribed interviews, created hundreds of movie files associated with each transcript, and then posted the full-text, full-video interviews on this public website. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) has recognized Urban School's Telling Their Stories project with a Leading Edge Recognition award for excellence in technology integration. Teachers interested in conducting an oral history project can contact Urban School technology director Howard Levin and should consider attending his teacher workshop in August.

Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/pompeii/
This interactive site features a timeline that not only gives an hour by hour account of the eruption and how the people reacted, but also gives visitors an opportunity to tour the modern day Pompeii, Herculean, and Oplontis, which have become tourist attractions in their own right. Users will also find information on each of the cities, information on volcanism, and an amazing photo gallery of artifacts, casts, frescos, and locations. A twenty-three page educator's guide is available with classroom activities, background information, and guiding questions.

Ancient Mesopotamia: This History,
Our History
http://mesopotamia.lib.uchicago.edu/
The Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago has recently launched "Ancient Mesopotamia: This History, Our History," a new instructional web resource about ancient Iraq. This resource is designed for use by K-12 educators and students nationwide and includes:

* A searchable Learning Collection of teacher-selected artifacts from the Mesopotamian Gallery

* A suite of student-friendly interactives and video clips

* A series of informational summaries about life in Mesopotamia

* An in-depth online course on ancient Mesopotamia by University of Chicago scholars

* Tips and strategies for integrating this resource into classrooms

The Lost Gospel of Judas
http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/
At this site visitors can explore the 1700 year-old document online and even
download the entire work, translated into English. There is background material on early Christian history and Gnosticism as well as FAQs. You can also learn about the process by which the document was recovered.

Econ EdLink
http://www.econedlink.org/
This site gives teachers tools to teach economics using the Internet, including model lessons and templates to create their own. The database includes lessons on a broad variety of topics and a range of grade levels. The Standards section helps you find lessons that correlate to your state's standards. A Current Events section provides access to the latest economic news and information and the lesson plans that relate to them. Also included are reviewed Web links that are organized by topic and include resources for curricular activities and economic data and a list of data links for finding macroeconomic data, primary source materials, charts and simulations.

American Experience Online http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/teachers/index.html
American Experience Onnline has reorganized its teachers' area to make it more useful for educators. Now you can browse a chronological list of historical topics to access all resources, or search by era, topic, feature type or media type. There are more than 1,500 features from more than 110 AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Web sites -- including timelines, primary sources, teacher's guides, maps, galleries, interactives, video, and more.

The Men Who Got Away
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/
bosnia502/index.html
FRONTLINE/World reporter Jennifer Glasse travels to Bosnia, Serbia and the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague looking for answers to why the two men most responsible -- former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and his top general Ratko Mladic -- are still at large. The web site offers features on Bosnia and Israel including extended interviews with Ehud and Aliza Olmert. And watch the newest video report in our "Rough Cut" series - a story from France in which reporter Marco Werman and producer Camille Servan-Schreiber speak with young rap musicians who vent the frustrations and anger that led to the riots in immigrant communities outside Paris last November.

Smithsonian Institution's Center for Education and Museum Studies
http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/
Smithsonian Institution's Center for Education and Museum Studies publishes Smithsonian in Your Classroom, a magazine for teachers that goes out free of charge to all the elementary and middle schools in the country. Browse lesson plans by subject area or search by grade levels and keywords. Smithsonian lesson plans emphasize inquiry-based learning using primary sources and museum collections. Each plan is print-friendly and provides you with all the materials you need—photographs, reproductions, handouts, activities, suggested strategies, standards information, and additional online resources.

Anne Frank Guide
http://www.annefrankguide.net/
The Anne Frank House has launched two new websites: The Anne Frank Guide for U.S. students and The Anne Frank Tree, www.annefranktree.com. The guide is a website especially developed for students to teach them about the Second World War and the Holocaust. Students can make a project online and send in projects they made. The Anne Frank Tree, available in six different languages, offers people around the world a platform to express their affinity with Anne Frank. For many people Anne Frank symbolizes freedom, regardless of their origin, faith or political beliefs. The core of the website is the chestnut tree that Anne Frank could see from the attic window in the Secret Annex, where she was hiding with seven others.

National History Day: Lesson Plans
http://www.nhd.org/LessonPlans.htm
The National History Day curriculum books contain lesson plans, classroom activities, research tips, Internet sources and many other useful teaching tools. The curriculum books are created related to the annual NHD contest theme, but the material can be used in general classrooms as well. 

Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/
IATH is a research unit of the University of Virginia whose goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. The research projects, essays, and documentation presented at their site are the products of a collaboration between humanities and computer science research faculty, computer professionals, student assistants and project managers, and library faculty and staff.

World War II Military Situation Maps, 1944-1945
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/
maps/wwii/
"World War II Military Situation Maps" contains maps showing troop positions beginning on June 6, 1944 to July 26, 1945. Starting with the D-Day Invasion, the maps give daily details on the military campaigns in Western Europe, showing the progress of the Allied Forces as they push towards Germany. These maps and reports were used by the commanders of the United States forces in their evaluation of the campaigns and for planning future strategies. The collection consists of 416 printed maps and 115 reports, the originals of which reside in the Library of Congress' Geography and Map Division. The collection also contains an "interactive essay" on the Battle of the Bulge http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/maps/wwii/essay1.html, which includes a slide show, detailed views of selected maps, and commentary and analysis from Library of Congress curators on the course of the battle.