Tip of the Week: 18th Century History Cooking Channel

We all love the History Channel. And we all love the Cooking Channel. So why not the History Cooking Channel?

Yup. The History Cooking Channel. A YouTube channel dedicated to exploring all things related to the 1700s – with a cool focus on cooking, food, baking, and eating.

It’s a perfect supplementary resource for you US and World history types. You get hundreds of quick videos highlighting how people cooked and ate during the 1700s. Kids can experience

American Experience: TV’s most watched history series and handy instructional tool

Television’s most-watched history series, American Experience has been hailed as “peerless” by the Wall Street Journal, “the most consistently enriching program on television” by the Chicago Tribune, and “a beacon of intelligence and purpose” by the Houston Chronicle.

And for what it’s worth, I like it too.

Seriously. Good. Stuff.

Top Ten Posts of 2015 #3: 5 tasty YouTube channels perfect for history geeks

I’m sure most of you are doing the same thing I’m doing right now. Spending time with family and friends, watching football, catching up on that book you’ve been dying to read, eating too much, and enjoying the occasional nap.

Between now and the first week in January, you’ll get a chance to re-read the top ten posts of 2015. Enjoy the reruns. See you in January!

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Yup. I’m a history geek. I’m a member of the History Book Club, I love maps, I stop and read every historical marker before driving past, I spent most of a morning several months ago quizzing the docent in the Northfield, Minnesota history museum on the 1876 raid by the James Gang, and I have the Band of Brothers DVD series memorized.

So where do I go when I need a good YouTube history video?

Here are five very sweet YouTube channels that are great places to start:

Print out a YouTube video. Handy tool or shiny gadget?

Yup. Print out a YouTube video. Holy sweet Googly tech trick, Batman!

When you are watching any video on the YouTube website, the storyboard (the images that appear just above the play bar when slide your cursor along it) for that video is automatically downloaded in the background. The Print YouTube tool stitches all of those storyboard image frames into one large poster that you can then download as a PDF or print out.

To get started, you drag the Print YouTube bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. Then open any video on YouTube, click the bookmarklet link, and the storyboard images are instantly generated. These storyboards offer a visual summary of videos and you can generate them for short videos as well as full-length movies.

But mmm . . . this seems like a perfect example of the question we should be asking every time we find out about a new tech tool:

Re-mastered The Civil War is going live

Most of us who channel surf – you know who you are – have a list. On that list is what some have called Shawshank movies. Named for The Shawshank Redemption, a Shawshank movie is any video that is so good that if encountered during surfing, it must be viewed to the end.

The Civil War by Ken Burns is that sort of video event. So good that if encountered by any self-respecting social studies teacher, it must be watched until the final minute. Forty million people watched the nine-part series when it first aired on PBS in 1990 and the Ken Burns love helped spark a Civil War craze. Millions purchased VHS copies of the series and the spin-off book. The film also made a star of Ken Burns.

The Civil War will be rebroadcast over five consecutive nights this week. The broadcast, which coincides with the 25th anniversary of the series’ initial broadcast in September 1990, will present for the first time a newly restored, high-definition version. This is also the first time the film will be seen with the same fidelity and framing as the negative that Burns and his co-cinematographers Allen Moore and Buddy Squires shot more than 25 years ago.

So.

1,000,000 minutes of historical YouTube goodness (and cat videos)

What could you do with one million minutes of historical YouTube video clips? If I’ve done my arithmetics correctly, that’s almost 7000 days or just over 19 years worth of video goodness. What could you do with that many video clips?

Deliver a base of foundational knowledge. Hook students into content. Develop writing prompts. Supplement instructional. Create a playlist of subject and period specific clips. Generate interest in a topic. Design a PBL unit around a series of related videos.

If your brain isn’t already bouncing off the walls in your head with other possible ideas, head over to the AP and Movietone YouTube channels to check out thousands of online video resources. I will guarantee that you’ll leave the vault with all sorts of possibilities.

According to their press release, the Associated Press and British Movietone, one of the world’s most comprehensive newsreel archives, are together bringing more than 1 million minutes of digitized film footage to YouTube. Showcasing the moments, people and events that shape the world, it will be the largest upload of historical news content on the video-sharing platform to date.