Teacher Tube Video

The following is a great TeacherTube video showing an actor portraying Major General George Gordon Meade and provides a nice overview of the Battle of Gettysburg:



Allow your students to review the video and then have a discussion about how Major General Meade handled the Battle of Gettysburg and what are some key points that your students learned.

Until next time...

More Statistics...Still too little time

Well, I'm not a statistician by any means and I've been struggling with the stats for my dissertation. But for some reason, I have quite a few blog posts on statistics. So, why not one more:

The following tables are the number of Union and Confederate soldiers who were killed, wounded or captured during the Gettysburg Campaign. These figures are adapted from Fox's Regimental Losses on the Civil War Home website.

The following shows the total Killed and Wounded for both Union and Confederates:

UNION
July 1 Killed -- 950

July 1 Wounded -- 4,550

July 1 Total – 5500

July 2 Killed -- 1500

July 2 Wounded -- 7,250

July 2 Total – 8,750

July 3 Killed -- 705

July 3 Wounded -- 2,745

July 3 Total – 3,450

Total Killed -- 3,155
Total Wounded --14,529
Total Killed and Wounded-- 17,684

CONFEDERATE
July 1 Killed -- 900

July 1 Wounded -- 4,350

July 1 Total – 5,250

July 2 Killed -- 1,175

July 2 Wounded -- 5,325

July 2 Total – 6500

July 3 Killed -- 1,425

July 3 Wounded -- 5,575

July 3 Total – 7000

Total Killed -- 3,500
Total Wounded --15,250
Total Killed and Wounded-- 18,750

By Location on the Battlefield:

Wheat-Field: Union Losses 4,133 Confederate Losses 2,822

Emmittsburg Road: Union Losses 2,645 Confederate Losses 1,978

Peach Orchard: Union Losses 1,285 Confederate Losses 1,047

Round Top: Union Losses 575 Confederate Losses 826

Total: Union Losses 8,638 Confederate Losses 6,673

So, lets start asking some questions:

• What percentage were killed on the first day of the Battle?
• What percentage of the Union losses occurred in the Peach Orchard?
• Why were Union causalities lower on July 3rd?
• What percentage of Confederates were wounded on July 2nd?

And the questions could go on and on...

Until next...enjoy the statistics !

Finding Photos on Flickr

For those who are not familiar with it, Flickr is a way for users to share their photos online. Users can make them public or private depending on how they want to share them. The great part about Flickr is that users can tag their photos so they are searchable similar to bookmarks with del.icio.us.

One additional thing is that Flickr supports RSS feeds for these tags. This means that you can do search for a particular tag, then subscribe to the RSS feed for that tag and everytime someone uploads a photo and tags it with your search, it will come right to your RSS aggregator.

Here is an example:

Say you want to setup an RSS feed for photos with the tag "Gettysburg" in them

• Got to this url: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/gettysburg/
• Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you will see a link that says "Subscribe to stuff tagged with gettysburg" -- Add this link to your RSS Aggregator and that's it!
• If you want to change the tag, simply replace the word Gettysburg in the above URL with any tag such as Antietam, CivilWar, battlefield, etc.

A few comments on this feature:

• You can get some great photos to show in your classroom.
  
• There are some incredible shots done by professional photographers
• You can locate some original photos by Civil War era photographers such as O'Sullivan and Brady.
• Some of the photos may even be in the Creative Commons
• Beware! You may also get photos of people vacationing in Gettysburg.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Until next time...

Gettysburg Done in Legos?

Well, 145 years ago the Battle of Gettysburg was raging and would become what some would call the turning point of the Civil War.

Recently, I was bored and started searching around YouTube for Gettysburg related videos and came across the following video and just had to share. I present, The Civil War: Gettysburg Day 1 done with Legos!



Click the movie to play.

You can also find videos for Day 2 and Day 3 of the Battle.

A little levity as we reflect on all those men and boys who were killed or wounded 145 years ago.

Until next time...