Upper+School+Humanities+(English+and+History)

// "I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. // // All act and react upon one another." // // [|Mahatma Gandhi] //

Great ideas for the Humanities, Civics, and Government
** [|1. Teach Democracy] **  It's a presidential election year, and blogger Mark Phillips has tips for educating students to be active participants in our democratic process. ** [|2. Use Game-Based Learning to Teach Civics] **  Blogger Andrew Miller on how civics games and simulations can give students a feel for how government really works. ** [|3. Show Students How to Stand Up and Speak Out] **  Blogger Rebecca Alber shares tips for including social justice lessons and activities in school curriculum. ** [|4. Use Service Learning to Engage Kids] **  Get strategies for starting meaningful service projects that help the community and boost student connections. ** [|5. Expose Students to Democratic Decision Making] **  From the archives: Blogger Suzie Boss shares the story of how one influential statesman was changed by an early experience in student government.

==**New Web Tool “Inklewriter” Is Easiest Way To Write Choose Your Own Adventure Story**== As regular readers know, I’m a big fan on online Choose Your Own Adventure stories — both having students read and create them (see The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories). And, even though I list several options in that list on how to write them, there has never really been a super simple way to do so. Until now. The new free web tool Inklewriter is, without a doubt, the easiest way to write a choose your own adventure story. You can read more about it at Gamasutra, New, free tools allow any novice to make an accessible text adventure. I can’t wait to have my students try it out in the fall!

Great Infographics for Language Classrooms
These are really good graphics that illustrate and teach about language from basic to advanced skills in grammar and composition. Take a look and I think you might like them. Maybe a poster for class next year...incorporating into a lesson....or posting on classroom blog? From the website, click on links that take you to the page for each part. From there, you can click on any image to enlarge it. @http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.educatorstechnology.com%2F2012%2F05%2F5-great-infographics-for-language.html?gname=webtools4educators

Topics Include: Any questions, let us know!
 * < Part One
 * Definite and indefinite articles
 * All about Adjectives
 * Punctuation
 * Passive Voice
 * When to use e.g and i.e ||< Part 2 :
 * How to Use Quotation Marks and Punctuation
 * Subjective I wish I were
 * Modal Verbs
 * Ten Tips to Improve your Grammar
 * Parallel Structure ||
 * < Part 3 :
 * Apostrophes The Importance of Good Grammar
 * Adjectives Degree of Comparison
 * Most Misspelled Words
 * Ten Hyphenation Tips
 * Fifteen Most Useful Phrasal Verbs ||< Part 4 :
 * Fourteen Typical Mistakes with Prepositions
 * New Words of 2010
 * The Most Annoying Writing Mistakes
 * Common Rules for Capital Letter Usage
 * The Story of Modifiers ||

Eight Parts of Speech
[| http://www.techlearning.com/article/eight-parts-of-speech/52131]

Learning the parts of speech can be tedious, but [|this interactive site] might spark some interest. Middle schoolers need to understand the eight parts of speech and how they help students become good writers and readers. This packet identifies the parts of speech and gives a definition and the function of each one. A slide show gives examples and a rap by 9th graders helps make the learning fun. A brief activity tests what's been learned. (//courtesy of [|netTrekker]//)

Video - Create a Collaborative Digital Writing Portfolio



With the help of Steve Hargadon and Chris Dawson I recently discovered a neat feature in Scribd. In Scribd you can create public collections to which any Scribd user can add documents. As the creator of the collection you can moderate the submissions before they appear in your collection. I made a short screencast on how to do this. The screencast is embedded below.

Creating a public collection in Scribd could be a good way to showcase examples of your students' best work. You can use the Scribd widgets to embed the entire collection into a blog or website or just direct people to the collection on Scribd itself.
 * Applications for Education **

=**Video - The Last 100 Years in 10 Minutes ** =

Here's a short video overview of the last 100 years. 90% of the video is about events (mostly war-related) in Europe and North America. Despite one small spelling error, it's not a bad broad overview of history.

 Along the same lines, Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes is an interesting overview of world history. The video demonstrates what can be done with data sets in Gap Minder.  //H/T to Open Culture for the first video.// This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.

==Watch Freedom Riders Online for Free ==

The American Experience documentary Freedom Riders recently popped-up in my Netflix suggestions. That suggestion made me wonder if Freedom Riders is available for full-length viewing on the American Experience website. It turns out that it is. You can watch the nearly two-hour story of civil rights activists who in 1961 banded together to challenge segregation laws and practices in the south. <span style="color: #808080; display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Watch Freedom Riders on PBS. See more from American Experience. If you do not have the time to show the entire documentary in your classroom, the American Experience/ Freedom Riders website has many excerpts that you can watch. American Experience offers an extensive viewing guidefor teachers to use with their students. //(This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.)//
 * Applications for Education **

==<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">World Map - Visualize, Explore, and Publish Geographic Information ==



World Map is a free program developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. World Map is designed to enable creation, visualization, and exploration of geographically referenced information. In other words, you can build some great mapped data visualizations on the service.

To create a map on World Map you can use the more than 1800 data sets that are stored in the service or you can upload your own data sets. The majority of the data sets in the World Map library have abstracts explaining a bit about the purpose and scope of the data. There are five default base maps that you can choose to build upon. Alternatively, you can choose to create your map completely from scratch and upload your own base layer to build upon. Maps that you create on World Map can be embedded into a website, printed, or viewed in Google Earth.

The video below provides a short overview of how to create a map using World Map. There are many other how-to videos on the HGA YouTube channel.

If you're looking for web-based map creation and analysis tools that offer more than you can find in Google Maps, give World Map a try. You might start out using World Map in your classroom by using the data set library then expand its use by having students create and or find other data sets to import.
 * Applications for Education **

==<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">GE Teach - Teaching With Google Earth ==

Recently, a high school geography teacher, Josh Williams, contacted me to share his website GE Teach. GE Teach is built around the Google Earth browser plug-in. The purpose of the site is to help teachers develop lessons in which students explore spatial distributions.

Visitors to GE Teach can select from a variety of physical geography and human geography layers to display and explore. A fantastic feature of GE Teach is the option use the "two Earths" mode to show two maps side-by-side. In the image below (click to view full size) you can see that I have used the Earth on the left to view climate regions and the Earth on the right to view population density. The "two Earths" mode could be useful for prompting students to make comparisons and or correlations between two maps.

If you don't have Google Earth installed on your school's computers, GE Teach is an excellent web-based alternative for you and your students. Even if you do have Google Earth installed on your school's computers GE Teach offers a great service that you and your students can use to explore spatial distributions and relationships.
 * Applications for Education **

==<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Videos - Primary Elections and Gerrymandering Explained == <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">2012 US Presidential election campaigns are out in full force now. If you're trying to explain primaries and caucuses to your students, C.G.P. Grey has a new video explaining primaries. There is a little bit of editorializing in the video, but overall it is a good primer on the purposes and functions of caucuses and primaries.

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<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">Staying with the theme of political science, C.G.P. Grey also has a video explanation of Gerrymandering. The video uses animals instead of people and political parties to explain how Gerrymandering works. Again, there is a bit of editorializing in the video, but it still provides a good overview of the concept.

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//This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//

The company has launched a special collection that will help students research and analyze the 2012 election by looking at the candidates, the major issues, events, and the process behind the campaigns. The collection of NBC News reports will be updated continually on weekdays through the inauguration in 2013.
 * NBC Learn Decision 2012**
 * (www.nbclearn.com)**

==<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Old Maps Online - Find Historical Maps for Your Area ==

Old Maps Online is a good use of Google Maps that I recently learned about through Google Maps Mania. Old Maps Online is designed to help you find historical maps of where you live or any other location that you enter into the search function. By default Old Maps Online searches for maps near your location. You can refine your search to a specific time using the timeline slider on Old Maps Online.

Old Maps Online doesn't host the maps that you find through their search box. Old Maps Online refers you to the host of the maps. One of the frequently used hosts is the David Rumsey Historical Map collection.

There are other ways to find historical maps online, but Old Maps Onlinemakes it very easy to do. The maps that you and your students find could be used as overlays in the Google Earth layers. You might also use the maps for a local history comparison activity by comparing your students' current vision of where they live with what it looked like in the past. //This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//
 * Applications for Education **

==<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Guides to the Global Economy for Students == The Global Economy.com is a nice resource developed for high school and undergraduate students by Georgia State University Economics Professor Neven Valev. The purpose of TheGlobalEconomy.com is to provide guides to understanding the economies of individual countries and the global economy in aggregate.

To accomplish the goal of helping students understand global economics, TheGlobalEconomy.com offers a database of articles about the economies of individual countries. You can select any country from the list of more than 200 to find basic economic indicators about that country. The country profiles include not just the data associated with economic indicators, but also explanations of the indicators, and graphs of the data in comparison with other countries.

**Scholastic's Interactive IMMIGRATION Unit**
New interactive resources from Scholastic about immigration! Great digital resources from virtual explorations, to young immigrant narratives, to data interpretation. @http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/index.htm

Resource of the Month: **Show - Mapping Worlds** Show Mapping Worlds is an amazing tool that allows users to break apart maps based on many different statistics. Imagine being able to show an interactive map that shows how many people are alive in the world and how old they are and then breaking down how many people have died of different diseases or are in a particular job or age bracket. This is a truly interesting tool that makes social issues, history, and other subjects spring to life. Many classrooms can use this as a way to enhance presentations and also make quick visual representation of data. **__ Check out Show Mapping Worlds here... __**

==<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">History Engine - Explore Stories of American Life == Source: Free Technology for Teachers - Richard Byrne



History Engine is an educational project developed by The University of Richmond for the purpose of giving students a place to explore stories of American life and publish their own stories based upon their research.

I was initially drawn to History Engine by the map and timeline that was featured on Google Maps Mania. The History Engine map allows students to search for stories by selecting a decade on the timeline then clicking a location on the map. Students will find stories about ordinary citizens making minor news in their communities as well as stories about famous Americans like George Washington.

History Engine provides an extensive guide for teacherswho want to have their students research, write, and publish stories. History Engine offers an easy-to-follow style guide that students can use to format their writings. If you're looking for some good ideas and resources for getting students to use primary sources in their historical writings, History Engine is a website that you should give a good look. //This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//
 * Applications for Education **

The Paul Revere House: The Midnight Ride
From Tech&Learning []

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five, Paul Revere made his famous ride, memorialized by Longfellow’s poem, which took certain liberties with the truth. Perhaps Revere rhymed more readily than Dawes or Prescott, who also were involved with the warning about the British troop movements. At any rate, [|here you will find the real story of Paul Revere’s ride] and the actions of William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott, who were also with him that night. Examine interesting maps, one of which is interactive, Revere’s own words about what happened that night, and, of course, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s unforgettable poem. There is also a link to a biography of Paul Revere, which explores more than that few hours of that fateful night before the shot that was heard around the world.

How Art Made the World: Learning Resources
@http://www.techlearning.com/article/how-art-made-the-world--learning-resources/52431

Using the PBS documentary "How Art Made the World" as a jumping off point,[| these][|five lessons] ask students to think about fundamental concepts such as how the human form is represented, styles of portraiture, the messages that art conveys, art as an act of self-expression, and using art to communicate personal memories. Each lesson includes learning objectives, the materials needed for the lesson, the national standards addressed, and classroom activities. Although most suited for grades 9-12, these plans could be adapted for middle school students.

==<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Shakespeare Animated ==

Yesterday, I Tweeted a story from Open Culture that highlighted 12 animated Shakespeare stories. In my investigation of the video source that Open Culture highlighted, I discovered Shakespeare Animated. Shakespeare Animated is a YouTube channel containing twelve playlists ten of which are animated adaptations of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Some of the animated plays that appear in the Shakespeare Animated playlist are //Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, MacBeth//, and //The Taming of the Shrew//. I've embedded part one of //Romeo and Juliet// below.

The Shakespeare Animatedvideos could be useful for supporting your students' reading of Romeo and Juliet or any of the nine other plays in the list. Because the plays are broken into segment they are well-suited to being used one class meeting at a time. You could show the ten to twelve minute segments //This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//
 * Applications for Education **

==<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">New 3D Photo Tours on Google Maps == <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">This morning Google announced the release of a new way to view images in Google Maps. 3D Photo Tours on Google Maps is a collection of public Panoramio and Picasa images of famous landmarks arranged into 3D panoramic tours. You can take a tour of places like the Grand Canyon, Buckingham Palace, and Fenway Park. Here's a complete list of the places for which 3D photo tours are available. To access these new views you do have to have to be using a modern browser that supports Web GL technology. The video below highlights the new 3D Photo Tours on Google Maps.

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<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">** Applications for Education **

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">If you don't have access to Google Earth on your school's computers, the 3D Photo Tours in Google Maps is a great alternative for showing students what some of the famous landmarks they may have studied look like. //This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.//