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...

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...