Mr. T, an 8th grade American Cultures teacher at Hershey Middle School, is the author of the American Cultures 2.0 blog. While reviewing his blog recently, I noticed that he has developed two great uses of Web 2.0 technologies for teaching the Civil War.
The first one is called What stories do these Civil War photographs tell? In this short blog post, Mr. T uses a quick VoiceThread video to get students to look at a photograph and answer questions. There are even several student responses to this post. Very cool!
The second one is called Civil War Day and shows a very nice Animoto photo slide show. The photo slide show is a collection of Civil War era photographs from the Library of Congress and is set to some somber period music.
So, here are two more examples of how you (and your students) can create and share things you are doing in your classroom.
Create & Collaborate!!!
Until Next Time…
Jim,
Thanks for recognizing my VoiceThread and Animoto video. Both are great tools for students to use. As a final project my students wrote a mini-saga (exactly 50 word story) about what they learned in class, and created a video showing what they learned visually. Most of the students chose to do their video using Animoto. I was able to get a class code so the students could produce full length videos. The students produced some very impressive mini-sagas and videos. I got the class code at the Animoto For Educators site:
http://biz.animoto.com/education/overview.html
There are certainly a lot of possibilities for Web 2.0 applications in the classroom. Teachers need to take a cue from Nike and “Just do it”.
Art Titzel