Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

For the past few years, the United States Library of Congress has been aggressively pushing its archives online through such sites as Flickr and others. This wealth of resources that was previously hidden away in stacks somewhere can now be utilized by educators thanks to the technological revolution. The latest push from the Library of Congress is its new App for iPhones and other Apple devices. The Library of Congress Virtual Tour is free for download at the iTunes store (I’m not sure if an Android version is coming in the future) and features galleries of exhibits along themes such as the Bible, Creating the United States, and Exploring the Early Americas.

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Ever watch Pop-Up Video? Or have you noticed the first-down line that magically appears when you watch football on TV? These are examples of augmented reality — adding information to enhance a real-world view. Thanks to efforts like the American Civil War Augmented Reality Project, the concept is making its way into education. A few Pennsylvania teachers plan to use this technology to help visitors understand Civil War battlefields.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

At Interactives at Learner.org, you will find interactive activities in the content areas of math, science, language arts, history, and the arts. Within each activity there is a combination of text, animations, pictures, and interactive material. I used this one on the rock cycle with my students last year.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

AnswerGarden is sort of like a virtual garden, in which you plant a question or query and wait patiently for folks to provide the answers or responses. The “garden” of responses then grows right before your eyes. Free to use, easy to set up, and even easier to respond to, AnswerGarden is an interesting brainstorming or response tool that uses the concept of “word clouds” to display what visitors have written.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Everyone knows nuclear weapons are deadly. Ground Zero makes the destruction hit home, semi-literally.

This Google Maps mashup lets you see what would happen to your hometown (or another location of your choosing) if it was hit by various nuclear weapons. Pick your poison, which ranges from Fat Man and Little Boy to the Soviet Tsar Bomba, which caused the largest explosion ever. You can even look at the impact of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, proving that man is still no match for nature. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Like most children going through middle school and high school, I on occasion was shown one of those grainy black-and-white film on the day we had a sub. You know the ones, made during the good old days when the narrators talked in monotone, the music consisted of dramatic orchestra swells, and everyone wore suits or long dresses. Well, the good old days are back in full force with the government-funded FedFlix, an extensive archive of government-funded films made from back in the 1940s to the modern day.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Any time there is a good merger of the study of history and the use of technology, it’s a surefire Instructify post. This is the case with the site Show Me from our friends on the British Isle. Show Me is a cataloging of the best (and most fun) resources from museums and galleries across the United Kingdom. It’s a great idea — with as many museums and historical locations as Britain has, it’s a lot easier to collect all the kid-friendly content in one place rather than having to go to each museum’s web site.

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BY BILL FERRIS

This video takes James May, the host of Britain’s Top Gear TV show, on board an American U2 spy plane as it flies to the very edge of outer space. You have to see the video to appreciate how high these things fly — a commercial air liner flying below them looks like a speck of dust, the curvature of the earth is plainly visible, and the pilot and host each have to wear space helmets just to stay alive, for crying out loud. This quote sums it up nicely: “If this were 1955 we’d be considered space men. Becasue at that height the atmosphere would kill you as certainly as space would. You’d just boil, you’d be dead in seconds.”

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BY BILL FERRIS

Popular Science magazine has made the archives of its entire 137-year catalog available for free online. If you’ve a scientific bent, you’ve probably read an issue or two and gotten some ideas for class from the venerable magazine. Just think what you can do with more than a century’s worth of content? Find cool projects, explain difficult concepts in plain English, and perhaps most importantly, show students that science has lots of practical and fun applications in everyday life.

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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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