Instructify

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Primary resources are the most important historical tool that students, teachers, and scholars have to examine the past. As someone who holds a degree in history and holds history near to his heart, the compacting and summarizing of society-changing documents into a single paragraph in a text book brings a tear to my eye. More and more, historical documentation is referenced for justification by those who have not read what was actually written.

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BY BILL FERRIS

The Lincoln Log has nothing to do with those fun wooden playsets you can build houses with. Instead, it’s “A daily chronology of the life of Abraham Lincoln.” Seeing as how Lincoln lived long before people could record the daily minutiae of their lives in blogs, the staff of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln combed through a lot of historical documents in order to find out what Honest Abe was up to on any particular day. In addition to a keyword search, you can search by date, year, or see what happened today in Lincoln’s life.

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BY BILL FERRIS

They say you never want to see how sausage or laws get made. I for one find both processes fascinating, but I’m glad only one of the two has a website with audio and video. The Oral History of the U.S. House of Representatives shows you the legislative branch through the eyes of the people who were there during several important historical periods.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.

Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.

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BY BILL FERRIS

I’ve only been to Washington, D.C. once in my life. It was a great trip, and I loved seeing so much American history up-close. The spot that made the greatest impression on me was the Lincoln Memorial, not only because of Lincoln’s legacy, but also because of how impressive the monument itself is. It’s hard to truly appreciate the monument without seeing it and its gigantic statue in person. The Lincoln Memorial Interactive website, however, comes close.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Today we’ve got two resources dealing with comics for you:

Before political cartoons devolved into crude drawings depicting a guy wearing a T-shirt labeled “TAXES” and smashing something with a hammer, they were elaborately drawn works of art, and often featured more text than some of today’s news stories. The Hale Scrapbook from The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library maintains an extensive collection of editorial cartoons from Gregorian England. Your students will be able to see the issues of the era as seen through the lenses of the doodlers of the day. Some seem kinda weird. Others show that times really haven’t changed that much.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Here in North Carolina, we pride ourselves on being the home of the Wright Brothers’ first flight (you hear that, Ohio?) So naturally, we at Instructify were interested in the experimental aircraft showcased on Lessons of a Widowmaker (and Other Aircraft), a terrific multimedia site from NASA.

NASA has tested some cool aircraft in its day, including the U2 spyplane, the Black Widow, and the Northrup HL-10, a wingless (!) aircraft that was an early ancestor of the modern space shuttle and weighed about as much as a Cadillac Escalade. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

You now can access lots of free audio and video from the Library of Congress on iTunes U. There’s a lot of great material suitable for a history class, such as early films made by Edison himself (or his company, at least). There are also fascinating oral histories from actual slaves in the Voices from the Days of Slavery collection. For a look at how people entertained themselves before TV, radio and the interweb came to be, you can look at early American animation, and even olde timey Vaudeville performances.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Stuck inside classrooms, a lot of students don’t get to experience the hands-on aspects of history and archaeology. Though driving a mouse isn’t exactly hands-on, by clicking to Interactive Dig: El Carrizal from Archaeology Magazine, students can see photo updates and read first-hand accounts of this in-progress archaeological project.

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BY BILL FERRIS

As schools move away from rote memorization of facts, what happens to those kids who like to rattle off the state capitals or list all the presidents? They can put their knowledge of educational trivia to good use at Sporcle, a site filled with countless list-style quizzes that will exercise kids’ knowledge of…well, just about everything.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Create time lines easily with xtimeline, a handy web tool that creates time lines. Easily. Time lines. Hence the name “xtimeline.”

To start putting a time line together, you just enter an event, the date it occurred, plus a description and images. There’s really not much to it, folks. xtimline puts it all together in a logical, easy-to-read order.

A history class is the most obvious application for xtimeline, but you could use it for a variety of subjects. It’s an ideal companion for research papers, or reports on anything from the life of Mark Twain to the history of the computer.

xtimeline doesn’t look as slick as Mnemograph (now called TimeGlider), but its usability makes it a great choice unless you need a really fancy-schmancy printable time line for some reason. Hey, I’ve cobbled time lines together in Word and Excel, and I assure you that if you just need a quick time line that looks presentable, xtimeline is a much better way to go.

xtimeline

Related stuff:

Time Lines are on your Side with Mnemograph

BY BILL FERRIS

As further proof that my pop-culture awareness stopped sometime in the mid-90s, this month’s random roundup features Indiana Jones, apparently Instructify’s go-to reference to convey that a history or archaeology tool is exciting or adventurous in some capacity.

Of course, now that they’re making a fifth Indiana Jones movie, I don’t feel quite so dated.

National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid: Archaeology with No Risk of Snakes or Nazis!
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones and I dreamed about being on Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple. Sadly, I’m not currently exploring foreign lands for ancient artifacts and getting chased by Nazis, nor did I ever get the chance to be a Blue Barracuda. But with National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid, your students can have the opportunities that I never did, and learn while doing it!

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BY BILL FERRIS

In Escape from the Mummy’s Tomb! your elementary students must recover Egyptian artifacts from inside a pyramid. As the title of the game has no doubt alerted you, you’ll have to wrest these artifacts from an undead mummy’s cold, dead, bandaged fingers.

After your students have finished their archaeological adventure, they’ll find themselves in a museum, where they must put the artifacts in their proper display cases. (more…)

BY NICK YINGLING

One of my fondest memories growing up was this time when my friends and I found an old treasure map. We eventually ran afoul of a family of gangsters, but my one heavyset buddy was able to befriend the deformed son of the head gangster, Mama Fratelli. Just as the gangsters caught up with us, Chunk and his new friend, Sloth, were able to swoop in and save the day. We were, truly, a bunch of Goonies. No, wait—there I go again, confusing myself with Corey Feldman.

That image you get in your mind when you imagine treasure maps isn’t just fascinating because of the promise of riches. That classic example of some old, yellow, frayed-at-the-edges map also maybe has some crazy artwork of an agitated seabeast where there be dragons or something. You can just feel the wonder of exploration resonating from old-world cartography.

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has been busy scanning these old maps and making them available free-of-charge in digital high-resolution images. (more…)

BY EMILY JACK

Quick: Which is more likely to stimulate your students’ interest in the Cold War?

A. A PowerPoint presentation about the Cuban missile crisis
B. A creepy photo of a real family fallout shelter

If you answered A, your PowerPoint skills are supernatural and you probably need no further help from Instructify. If you answered B, have a look at Smithsonian’s History Explorer.

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