DocsTeach from National Archives

The National Archives has revamped it's look and made access to teaching with primary documents much easier. Check out their site! 

Richard Byrne of Free Tech for Teachers recently created a tutorial video that demonstrates how you can use DocsTeach to find primary source lesson activities and or create your own primary source lesson activities. All activities can be completed online.

Google's X Degrees of Separation - The Connection Between Artwork

Google has several different experiments in the works right now. One is their X Degrees of Separation where the user enters 2 artworks and Google finds a connection between them through other artworks. The purpose of X Degrees of Separation appears to be to show viewers how cultures can be connected through art. Each image that appears in the connections is linked to an individual page that will include a bit of information about the work.

Read more from Richard Byrne of Free Tech 4 Teachers. 

#BookSnaps

What is a #BookSnap? -- A BookSnap is simply a digital, visual representation used to annotate and share reflections of any excerpt of a book or text.

   

Examples ofBookSnaps

#BookSnaps on Twitter

Video: #BookSnaps in Google Drawing & Slides

Video: #BookSnaps with FREE PicCollage app (on our iPads)

Read more here.

Read morehere too.

If you’re interested in investigating this further, please let me know! I’m super excited about having a way for our students to share their learning with the world! (And it could be a great #communication or #creativity 5C badge… just throwing that in there.)

Wilson Center's Collection of Declassified Documents

This is the Wilson Center's Collection of Declassified Documents. Find documents on all kinds of events in our history!

History Gal's 5 YouTube Channels that Rock

The Musings of a History Gal posted a list of YouTube videos that are good for teaching history. It says there are 5 channels but she has added more. See her list here.

Common Sense's Top EdTech Eleven

Common Sense publishes a Top EdTech Eleven list and updates it often. Check it out to see what they say is the best of the best in the world of EdTech.
If you have any questions or want someone to investigate with you, please contact your DLC, Penney Matos!

Newsela for today's news

Little known start-up @Newsela is a great way to keep students (and adults) informed about today's news! Read more here. Visit Newsela here.

Free Resources from the National Archives and the Library of Congress

  

Check out these awesome FREE resources:

• 7 FREE Mobile & Web Apps from the National Archives 
• 5 FREE Teacher Tools from the Library of Congress

American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History

American Panorama is a FREE historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps. 

Common Sense Graphite's review of the website.

Google Classroom: Share from Gale

Any resources found through Gale (access through MackinVia) can be shared directly with your students through Google Classroom.

Instructions for adding a Gale item to the Google Classroom linked here.

Instructions for downloading a Gale article (with notes and highlights) to Google Drive linked here.

Video tutorial on using Gale with Google Classroom linked here.

Video tutorial on adding Gale resources to Google Drive linked here.

A Teacher's Guide to Wikipedia

Often teachers ban students from using Wikipedia which may not be the best practice. Take a look at Edudemic's article, A Teacher's Guide to Wikipedia. It discusses pros and cons, situations when using Wikipedia is helpful, and more. 

The Syrian Refugee Crisis explained

I recently ran across this video explaining the Syrian refugee crisis. The first half is helpful if you're looking for a way for your students to understand why the Syrian refugee crisis is such a big thing and where it started. The second half of the video gets a bit biased about why countries should accept refugees, just FYI.

https://youtu.be/RvOnXh3NN9w

Histography - Timeline of History

This is one of the coolest websites I've run across.

histography.io

Every dot is a historic event from Wikipedia.

Resize the bottom bar to view any time period or era.

Use navigation on the left to narrow by topics including literature, music, wars, politics, construction, inventions, riots, women rights, disasters, art, nationality, discoveries, empires, assassinations, and religion.

170,000 Great Depression photographs released

170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) have been released to the public.

Here’s an article about the pictures: money.cnn.com/gallery/news/economy/2015/10/19/great-depression-170000-photos-yale/index.html

You can look through the 170,000 photos from the Great Depression here: photogrammar.yale.edu

You can view by category or by map. It’s pretty cool!

TED-Ed: Superhero Science and more cool topics

Superhero Science is a playlist of science lessons published by TED-Ed. The lessons in the playlist feature explanations of what would happen in various scenarios if you had superhero powers like flight, strength, and speed. Each lessons explains the mathematics and science of scenarios frequently found in superhero stories. For example, in the lesson on strength we learn what would happen if a superhero did catch someone falling from the top of a skyscraper.

On that same link, there is alist of all the other TED-Ed lesson series that are available.  Some fantastic stuff!

Actions and Reactions

Animation Basics

Awesome Nature

Before and After Einstein

Behind the Curtain

Click You Fortune

Cyber-Influence & Power

Discovering the Deep

Ecofying Citites

Everyone Has a Story

Exploring Theories

Getting Under Our Skin

Government: Declassified

How Things Work

Ingenuity in the Developing World

Inventions that Shape History

Making the Invisible Visible

Mastering Tech Artistry

Math in Real Life

Mind Matters

Mysteries of Vernacular

Our Changing Climate

Out of This World

Periodic Videos

Playing with Language

Questions No One (Yet) Knows the Answers To

Reading Between the Lines

The Artist's Palette

The Big Questions

The Way We Think

The World's People and Places

The Writer's Workshop

Things they Don't Teach in School (But Should)

Troubleshooting the World

Visualizing Data

What Will You Do with Your Life?

You Are What You Eat

You Graduated... Now What?

If you have never used TED-Ed before, if you create a FREE teacher account, you can customize the questions and activities that go with the videos and you can assign them to your students.

Let me know if you are interested in learning more about it.  I’d be happy to help set it up.

Dozens of Great PowerPoints for AP History Students & Teachers

From Richard Byrne (Free Tech 4 Teachers), Dozens of Great PowerPoints for AP History Students & Teachers

Endangered Languages Project

EndangeredLanguages.com is an online collaborative effort to protect global linguistic diversity. It shows languages of the world that are in danger of dying out. It includes approximately how many people still speak the language and, when possible, recordings of the language being spoken.

Google's Cultural Institute

Through Google's Cultural Institute, discover exhibits and collections from museums and archives all around the world. Explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail, from hidden gems to masterpieces.

Create your own galleries and share favorite finds with friends.

SmartyPins: Putting Trivia on the Map

Google Maps brings you Smarty Pins: Putting Trivia on the Map. 

Test your and your students' knowledge of trivia and geography.

TextCompactor.com

This is really cool!  http://textcompactor.com/

For struggling readers.  Take a piece of text and copy and paste it into the compactor.  The student can adjust the % of text to keep so they can understand the content.