Blatant self promotion and re-tweeting history

I had the chance yesterday to sit and chat with some incredibly interesting folks. There were five of us:

• Alwyn Colliinson – creator of the @RealTimeWWII Twitter feed
• Marion Jensen – runs the TwHistory website
• Michael Hobbs – historian and creator of the Cuban Missile Crisis Twitter feed
• Zach Hughes – tech blogger

We were asked by the Huffington Post to share our thinking about the practice of “re-tweeting” history.

So we did.

Tip of the Week: Voting Information Goodies

Apparently the election is over and the results are in.

The Scholastic Student Vote started earlier this fall and ended  this week. President Obama finished with 51%, Governor Romney finished with 45%, and 4% of the kids voted for another candidate. The Vote may not be official, but its results have often indicated who eventually wins the presidential race. Scholastic has conducted the student mock vote during every presidential election since 1940 and the results have mirrored the actual outcome of all but two elections—1948, when kids voted for Thomas E. Dewey over Harry S. Truman, and 1960, when they selected Richard M. Nixon over John F. Kennedy.

I’ll post more election goodies next week but thought I would start with some voting information so that you can get you own mock election started.

CiteLighter – Handy online research, citation, bibliography, sharing tool

Yes. I admit it. I watch the Food Channel. So sue me.

It’s not like I’m addicted or anything. I like eating food. I like making food. And so . . . I will watch Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives or the occasional Throwdown with Booby Flay.

But I don’t watch as much since Alton Brown’s Good Eats was moved to a weekday morning time slot. You remember Alton Brown. Nerdy guy. Science facts. Easy stuff to make. Yeah, that guy. He said a lot of things but one thing he repeated quite often:

The only one-task item you need in your kitchen is the fire extinguisher.

His argument? You shouldn’t own any kitchen gadget that doesn’t have more than one use.

Yeah. So?

iCivics: Awesome games, lessons, materials

Need some handy civics / government video games, lesson plans, and teaching materials? (And really . . . who doesn’t need handy civics / government video games, lesson plans, and teaching materials?)

If your answer is yes, iCivics just saved your bacon.

Back in 2009, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded iCivics to reverse Americans’ declining civic knowledge and participation.

Securing our democracy requires teaching the next generation to understand and respect our system of governance.

Tip of the Week: TV News Search and Borrow

The Internet Archive recently released  a new, very cool tool called TV News Search & Borrow. The searchable collection now contains 350,000 news programs collected over three years from national and metro U.S. networks. You can search by keyword, network, and specific TV show. You can also limit the time period searched by using the timeline slider.

The tool archives the closed caption transcripts of the different news shows and uses that as a searchable database that is linked to the actual video clip. Very cool idea.

And it can help you to find and use a wide variety of news coverage quickly and easily. It’s stated purpose is

to help engaged citizens better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs.  The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired. Older materials are also being added.

Data, information, knowledge, wisdom

I often get the opportunity to talk with teachers about teaching and best practice. It’s one of my favorite things. Small groups, large groups, one on one. It doesn’t matter. Having conversations about the art and science of teaching is always a good thing.

And I hear myself sharing with teachers one particular catchphrase over and over:

data, information, knowledge, wisdom

It’s basically the steps we need to take when we plan instruction.

• Train kids to collect data.
• Train kids to organize the data into patterns.
• Train kids to make conclusions based on those patterns.
• Train kids to act on their conclusions.

Yeah. I know. Simple on paper, hard to implement in real life. But as teachers, it seems as if we often stop after the first or second step.