KansasMemory.org sweetness

I’m at the MACE tech conference on the K-State campus listening to a session on the Kansas Memory site. I poked around the site a year or so ago and am really impressed with the changes they’ve made.

Modeled after the American Memory site and maintained by the Kansas State Historical Society, Kansas Memory does a great job of sharing and highlighting some fantastic primary sources. And even though the site focuses on a fairly specific sub-set of Kansas-related stuff, anyone who is teaching American History should also be using the site.

The content covers US events back to the early 1800s with a wide range of documents that can be tied into tons of different broader topics.

Some of the newer features:

• They’ve created something called Teacher Mode that provides content specifically aligned to Kansas state standards. If you create your account and check the teacher box, you enter this mode automatically when you log-in. You have the ability to turn Teacher Mode on and off while you’re at the site. You can also search just by state standard and indicator to find materials specific to that indicator.
• You can save searches as well as add items to your Bookbag for future use. You can also save documents to specific folders with annotations. This would be great for student research.
• The site has some semi Delicious-like features that let you browse the Bookbags of other users. This feature is especially useful when I’m looking at a specific document and I can see other users who have saved the same document. By clicking on their username, I can see what they have saved that may be similar to what I’m looking for.
• You can create RSS feeds to get updates on recently added resources as well as new items added to your saved searches.
• There is a nice collection of multimedia stuff with cartoons, videos, audio clips and artwork.
• The default screen allows you to click a specific Kansas county to pull up materials dealing with the county.

I like the attempts by the KSHS to make the site interactive with both content and with other users. There is a distinct Web 2.o feel to the site that encourages collaboration and discovery.

The video below is one I ran across while doing a search for Dust Bowl items. It brought back memories of stories that my father used to tell of rabbit drives in western Kansas. You never know what you’ll run across!

Updated – Wes Fryer of Moving at the Speed of Creativity fame was at an earlier session and has a great post with some sweet screenshots. Head over there to get a fuller description!

Cool free world history course

I first tried teaching world history back during my student teacher days to a bunch of overachieving college prep seniors. It didn’t really go that well. My content background was weak, my technique was poor and I didn’t have access to any real materials or resources.

I got better.

But it would have been so much easier if Bridging World History would have been available. Bridging World History is maintained by Anneberg Media and contains 26 thematic units focusing on major world history topics. Each unit has videos, audio clips, text overviews, instructional activities, teaching resources and appropriate primary sources.

Basically Bridging World History is an entire course, ready to go. The course is:

a set of multimedia materials designed to help learners discover world history and:

• Develop a dynamic conceptual framework for the study of world history, its theoretical constructs, and its historiographical practices.
• Establish a spatial and temporal grasp of the peoples and cultures that comprise world history, spanning thousands of years and the entire globe.
• Discover insights into thematic relationships that shape our understanding of world history.
• Span the gaps between what learners comfortably know and what they need to comprehend in order to explore a truly global and relevant past.

I see this as a great supplementary resource to use as part of instruction. It provides an excellent place to get ideas and new resources that can help teachers gather content and instructional strategies. You really need to check it out.

(And the great thing is that Anneberg Media has other courses as well.  There’s a wonderful US history course and a whole list of other goodies. Buzz on over!)

History for the 21st century

Just spent the last few days at the Midwest Educational Technology Conference in St. Charles, Missouri and, like most tech conferences, there were blogs, wikis, internet cafes, wires and pliers, Web 2.0, etc.

You know what I’m talking about. A lot of general ideas but few specifics about how to actually use some of this stuff in the classroom with kids who would rather be somewhere else.

But while I was there, I ran across something that I think I could use with kids pretty much anytime and actually have it make an impact. It’s called World History. It’s a site that is new enough that it is still in Invite Beta mode . . . so to use the site, you’ll need to get an invite email from them to create an account. As they slowly add users, they’ll sneak you in.

Trust me. It’s worth the wait. Simply go to World History and give them your email address. I got my invite within two days and have had just a day or so to play around but am already impressed.

Basically, World History is an aggregator of historical data. The engine that drives the data collection is a Google Map and a timeline. Manipulating where you are on the map and sliding the timeline around, forces World History to develop a list of relevant people, events, places, even artifacts that are relevant to that specific place and time. You can also search using just a timeline for people and events.

All searches lead you to a specific page that has even more related information. Sorta like Amazon’s “If you like this book, you might also enjoy this one” feature. All of these tools help create a very cool way of tying events, places and people together with cause and effect.

You can also create your own timelines, add stuff to your own database, search for timelines created by others and even do genealogy stuff.

One of the coolest things that I would use as a history teacher is the Project feature.

A worldhistory.com project is the community created grouping of events, people, and timelines that represent a single idea or sets of ideas in history. We call it a research project because you can use the tools for each project to work together as a community to discuss the topic, assign tasks, and fill in the gaps in order to create a complete idea.

I can see teachers and kids using this part of World History as a very cool portfolio activity, for research or for groups of kids working together.

I like it!

History . . . welcome to the 21st century.