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 JASON DON FORSYTHE

Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origins of Species 150 years ago, the Galapagos Islands have always been of particular interests to scientist and environmentalist alike. Back then the diversity of species as they evolved in relative isolation formed some of the basis of Darwin’s ground-breaking and controversial scientific hypothesis.

Fast forward a century and a half and a new debate surrounds the famous archipelago and its renowned environmental treasure. Like the rest of the planet, the Galapagos is trying to deal with an ever increasing human population in relationship to a finite amount of resources locally available; it’s a delicate balancing act in an area with a fragile ecosystem.

In order to document and present the challenges the islands face, a website call Living Galapagos has been created with a wealth of information about the current situation in the Galapagos. (more…)

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record the daily minutiae of their lives in blogs, the staff of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln combed through a lot of historical documents in order to find out what Honest Abe was up to on any particular day.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 JASON DON FORSYTHE

In light of the recent earthquake in Haiti, it seems appropriate to offer up tools for teaching about the possibilities of natural disasters and preparations that can be done locally in our schools which may better prepare students for coping with the situation should it occur. To that end, the Red Cross has assembled their Masters of Disaster curriculum focused for students K-8.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do you enjoy playing video games, learning geography, and helping those less fortunate, not necessarily in that order? The online game FreePoverty rewards your knowledge of geography by donating 10 cups of water to thirsty people around the world for every city or landmark you can correctly place on a world map.

Similar to FreeRice, FreePoverty lets you have fun and help others at the same time. (more…)

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

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

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

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

America runs on electricity. And coal, and wind power, and hydroelectric, and Dunkin Donuts. Powering a Nation, a multimedia project from the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication, looks at the cost of our current energy situation, the possible alternatives, as well as the consequences of making the sorts of wholesale changes that green energy would bring.

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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

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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BY BILL FERRIS

The neat thing about the past is so much interesting stuff happened during it. So much, in fact, that your typical history class doesn’t have time to mention all of it (obviously). The fine folks at How Stuff Works have the skinny on a lot of great historical info you don’t have time to cover in their Stuff You Missed in History Class Podcast.

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The early buzz about the world wide web was that it would throw open the floodgates of the world’s accumulated knowledge, creating a window into the cultures of the most far-flung places on earth. We instead got lolcats, pop-up ads, and meaningless quizzes about which superhero you are.

Fortunately, some wise folks had an eye on that original idyllic vision all along, and those folks now bring us the World Digital Library. A project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the site provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.

These cultural treasures include maps, photographs, manuscripts, audio and video recordings and more, and there’s at least one item from every UNESCO member country. The WDL’s interface is phenomenal, offering beautiful, high-resolution scans with incredible zooming capability. Check out this 18th century Japanese woodblock print; you can zoom in close enough to see individual paper fibers.

The site is also exceptionally easy to navigate — perhaps dangerously so, if you like looking at pretty pictures and are prone to losing track of time. You can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, or contributing institution, and the site is navigable in seven different languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The possibilities for using the WDL in the classroom are nearly endless: Social studies teachers, obviously, will find a treasure trove of primary source materials, but they can also show works created contemporaneously from around the globe for any era, enabling students to develop a holistic sense of global history. Second-language teachers can have students view culturally significant items in their target language. English language arts teachers can identify exquisite images, audio, and video for use as writing prompts. And the ability to browse by topic provides opportunities for use by those often-neglected STEM teachers: Among the topics to choose from is “natural science and mathematics,” which can be further limited to astronomy, geometry, medicine, physics, etc.

An entry under the topic “mathematical geography” is a 15th-century Egyptian book called A Guide for the Perplexed on the Drawing of the Circle of Projection. Many thanks to the World Digital Library for raising our collective IQ. This is what I always knew the internet could be. -EMILY JACK

World Digital Library

Related stuff:

Visit the Library of Congress online

Access Primary Sources Online with the Perseus Digital Library

Check out ibiblio, the Online Library

There are few places on Earth that seem to me more remote than Greenland.  Not to mention cold.  And dark.  During the winter, the sun really does not even rise.  Sounds like a place for your next vacation, right?  Thanks to NASA Cryospheric scientist Lora Koenig, you can experience winter in Greenland without making the actual trip and braving the minus-50 degree Celsius temperatures.  She spent this past winter in Greenland blogging about her experience.

As you read her weekly entries, you can come to understand some of the important work she is doing in Greenland.  She collected time measurements of snow surface temperature, microwave brightness temperature, and snow surface height.  These measurements all help with ongoing projects that NASA has involving several satellites.  In her entries, Lora tells you about her work and what life is really like in the winter in Greenland.  Even better, there are lots of pictures and a summit webcam and weather station!

In a classroom, this site could be utilized in different ways.  As part of a geography class, it could be used to highlight the different geographical features that exist in Greenland.  Your class could take a virtual field trip while immersed in the personal stories of the author.  In science, this website could be used to highlight important aspects of the  process of scientific inquiry.  This blog provides a great view into what it’s like to actually work as a scientist.  Using the weather station data, a math class could create graphs that track daily temperatures, and could even use other resources to add some local data comparisons to their graphs.  This blog opens up a new part of the world to your students.

As long as you can get past the chilliness that will seep into your bones as you peruse the site (I think I need to go put on a sweater), you’ll find at least a few ways that this resource could be useful to you and your students.  -REBECCAH HAINES

Winter Camp: A Blog from the Greenland Summit

Summit Camp Webcam and Weather Station

Related stuff:

Learn about hibernation

Meet Me at the Corner: Virtual field trips for kids, by kids