- Online Primary Source Collections
- Online Polling & Feedback
- iTunesU
- Google Advanced Search
- Free Google eBooks
- Thinglink.com
1) Online Primary Source Collections
The Library of Congress "Primary Source Sets" for teachers looks so valuable. As was pointed out, most teachers have spent hours of their free time trying to pull together sets of sources for students. While the number of topics seems somewhat limited, most US history classes will find something relevant.
The National Archives "Digital Vaults" website allows you to compile images and share them as a poster or movie. The amount of content seems overwhelming and it's hard to tell at first glance how easily you can find information.
At the Connections Conference last week, Elizabeth Helfant shared the Flubaroo widget for grading Google Docs (specifically what students submit through Google forms). It seems really useful, but you have to do a lot of the set-up yourself.
The website Socrative allows for a variety of response methods and you can reuse the same quiz multiple times in different circumstances. There is also an available game mode. Much easier interface and it will email you results as a spreadsheet.
Understoodit is another website that collects and tracks student responses. I haven't explored this one as much.
3) iTunesU
Wow. Find it by going to the iTunes Store, and then selecting iTunesU from the top navigation bar. You can access lectures and resources from professors at colleges and universities around the country. Wow.
4) Google Advanced Search
By using Google's Advance Search features, you can narrow your results by a number of aspects. To access the feature, type in a search term and then click on the settings/options cog-wheel icon to the right of your search bar. Select "Advanced Search." In this view you can limit results by language, region, type of site (.k12.* returns any website with .k12 in its address, which includes most public school districts), the type of file (perhaps you are looking for a PowerPoint to show your class), or by reading level (if you teach 4th grade you probably want to avoid the "advanced results").
5) Free Google eBooks
When you search books, you can limit your results to "Free Google eBooks," as well as selecting a specific century and books vs. magazines. The free books are fully available online and you can embed all or portions of the book on your blog. This would be great for drawing students' attention to specific excerpts of a text or providing specific resources from which to conduct research.
6) Thinglink
A fun website that actually has really interesting potential is Thinglink. At the site you upload or select an image, and then you can create hotspots/tags on the image. The end result is an interactive, online poster (a more limited, straight-forward version of sites like Glogster). The tags can display text or link to other images, text, video or audio on the web. Students could be provided with an image, and then have to create tags on it that provide context or clarification for the image. Ideas that came to mind quickly were identifying the aspects of a particular culture evident in an image, or identifying how the 5 themes of geography are represented in an image.
In the back of my mind throughout all of this is how we can work with online privacy restrictions and protections, given that most of the students with whom I work are under 13.
