Civil War in Four Minutes

Hi,

Just a quick link today to show you this video called The Civil War in Four Minutes.

I'm off to the National Educational Computing Conference and hope to pick up some ideas there for more posts and discussions.

Enjoy...

Civil War Wiki

I am sure that most of you are familiar with Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is a part of our students' world. But what is a wiki? A wiki is a web page or website that is setup to allow anyone to easily contribute to or modify the content. Wikis are often used to create different collaborative sites such as eduwiki.us

While doing some research, I came across this interesting wiki related to the Civil War. A quick scan of the table of contents for the wiki shows that it covers the major aspects of the war including Causes of the War, Secession, an Overview of the War, Slavery, the Outcomes and Aftermath. There is also an extensive Bibliography and References section.

How can you use a wiki like this in your classroom? You could use it as a resource for information or you could use it as a starting point for additional inquiry. For example, the wiki states that Senator Stephen Douglas was the most powerful Democrat in the 1850s. How can your students verify this information? What research and resources could they use to verify this statement? If your students find more information or something to refute the information on the Wiki, edit the page and add or change it. It is all about sharing and collaborating.

So, no matter how you use wikis, they are collaborative and are not ALL bad.

Just as an additional resource, here is Wikipedia's page on The Civil War

Until next time...

More uses of Web 2.0 Tools

Mr. T, an 8th grade American Cultures teacher at Hershey Middle School, is the author of the American Cultures 2.0 blog. While reviewing his blog recently, I noticed that he has developed two great uses of Web 2.0 technologies for teaching the Civil War.

The first one is called What stories do these Civil War photographs tell? In this short blog post, Mr. T uses a quick VoiceThread video to get students to look at a photograph and answer questions. There are even several student responses to this post. Very cool!

The second one is called Civil War Day and shows a very nice Animoto photo slide show. The photo slide show is a collection of Civil War era photographs from the Library of Congress and is set to some somber period music.

So, here are two more examples of how you (and your students) can create and share things you are doing in your classroom.

Create & Collaborate!!!

Until Next Time...

Sorry for lack of posts

My apologies for a lack of post recently but have been busy working on analyzing my survey results for my Chapter 4. I plan on a summary post in the near future of my results that I hope everyone will enjoy. I've also been writing two grant applications (one for expanding my doctoral research and one for our foundation) and working on other personal items.

In the meantime, I noticed that the TOCWOC Blog (among others) has begun to post Odds and Ends posts. This got me thinking that I can do something similar and thus increase the number and frequency of posts to my blog.

So, I have created a companion wiki to my blog simply called The Teaching The Civil War with Technology Wiki. I know, real original. I have started adding a few links and will continue to add links and resources as I get them and find them appropriate. Then when I have added some links, I will do a quick blog post pointing to those links and/or other quick notes or resources I've found.

BTW: If you are a teacher, you can get your own free wiki at Wikispaces

Until next time...