In the interest of raising funds for the education department of the museum, specifically for helping school districts pay for field trips to the museum and to pay for “virtual” electronic field trips for K12 students, Brett will be living the life of a Civil War picket soldier for the duration of his vacation time. He’ll be living in the large (heavily exposed) backyard of the impressive museum, living on rations, wearing the clothes, eating the hardtack, living the life.

In order to duplicate the very challenging schedule and responsibilities of a picket soldier, he’ll be spending several days a week on picket duty (similar to “watch” in the Navy). He’ll also be carrying out several ten mile marches to raise awareness of the Museum, and building a small winter quarters and wooden defenses.

My students and I quickly saw the tremendous social media potential of this event (Survivorman + Man vs. Wild + Prairie House) and organized ourselves, with the help of the Museum, into a social media platoon.

Brett will be keeping a handwritten journal (with sketches) of his experiences, interns at the Museum will be snapping photos, and making videos. All of this will presented to the world through daily updates on a WordPress blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, and on YouTube. All of these accounts will be linked.

So, through subscribing to our blog:  Civil War Soldier 24/7, teachers and students will be able to follow his experiences from day to day. On Twitter, you can show your support by following @cwsoldier24_7 (we’ll follow you back!). On Facebook, you can friend Brett Kelley, and become a fan of the National Civil War Museum. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel, but all of the media will be aggregated on our blog page. Each account is in the design phase for my students, so each account page should get prettier as we approach Brett’s vacation. Please spread the word!

Like all parents, we spent quite a bit of time (and argument) coming up with names for our children. Our two year old son was easy, he was named after my father-in-law, which happened to also be a name common in my Pennsylvania Dutch family- Jacob. No sweat. When we found out my wife was pregnant nine months ago, we went through the process again. We found out that the baby was a girl, and my side of the family had nothing. Nothing that a 21st century parent would consider, that is. So we went ethnic. My wife is Danish, and we picked an old Danish name- Maren.

A lot of parents don’t, and didn’t, do it this way as evident from a recent blog post by the Wolfram|Alpha team. It was an inspiring post for me, and led me to do a few historical experiments that might be useful in an American History classroom. The post pointed out one of Wolfram’s neat features, the ability to graph and get statistics for the frequency of given names since 1890 in the United States. Their example highlights the male given name “Roosevelt.” As you can imagine, the number of lucky young fellows granted the name spiked during and following the presidencies of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt (I was surprised to see that the Teddy spike was almost twice the size as the FDR spike). The cousin’s first names also show positive correlations.

So, what other interesting things could students do with this? It would be great for introducing new units, by trying out a few given names for key unit figures. We’re of course restricted to the period 1890 to about 2008, and it should be noted that the “spikes” I referring to are often really a very small percentage of all given names chosen by parents.

I’ve noticed both positive and negative correlations. If you stick to 20th century presidents without common given names, Dwight and Lyndon show positive correlations. Eisenhower’s name has a World War II spike, followed by a spike during and after his presidency. Ike, however, did not seem to catch on. Johnson has a short spike correlating with his VP candidacy in 1960, which was  greatly overshadowed by a spike during his re-election campaign (and the Civil Rights Acts) but then drastically falling during the mire of Vietnam.

What about first ladies? Jacqueline Kennedy and Hillary Clinton clearly win, with only slight bumps for Mamie Eisenhower, Florence Harding, Grace Coolidge, Lou Hoover. Pat Nixon (her real name was Thelma) and Eleanor Roosevelt fare better. Wolfram|Alpha is understandably confused by Lady Bird (Claudia) Johnson and Rosalynn Carter (Eleanor). Edith Roosevelt seems to have a positive correlation. More importantly her middle name, Kermit, also the name of her son who inherited Teddy’s sense of adventure, has an impressive spike and possibly a negative correlation during the heyday of a certain green frog puppet.

How about a few international leaders? No surprise- negative correlation for Adolph. I was very surprised by the effect of Winston Churchill on American parents.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X show positive results, with Malcolm showing a spike (no pun intended) around the release of Malcolm X in theatres.

More interesting results: old celebrities Errol Flynn and Rudolph Valentino and newer celebrities Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears.

When I drift from my original educational purpose, it’s probably time to stop writing. Let me know any interesting historical finds on your end (I’ll update this post- especially if you tweet me some of your finds!)

So, I’m thinking that at some point in the future, our Tweet data will be considered primary documents. What do the following say about history teachers in the (declining) Web 2.0 Era? How many of these were tweeted in class? For those of you new to Twitter, or perhaps completely unfamiliar with the tool, it’s actually quite easy to find these through Twitter’s search (I actually use TweetDeck). I thought I’d post some of these now, as the crop of “history teacher” tweets is dwindling due to summer break. Enjoy!

My history teacher seems to think that CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL.

Well I just saw my U.S. History teacher outside joining the strike so I guess no 1st period?

history teacher told me to stop tweeting

My history teacher is speaking German! I am so scared!

AP US history teacher stopped in. Told me I am vastly overqualified to push credit cards.

My history teacher completely skipped over the bad parts of dubyas presidency! She made it seem as if he was this great man.

Just saw my history teacher randomly outside with her kid. Lol weird.

Playing volleyball with my class and history teacher. Yes, we’re seniors.

History teacher: “they jumped Uncle Sam and took his pants.”

My first period iss soo boringggg !!!! Wow my history teacher doesn’t stop talking … Summer please ?

My history teacher just told me that im an exceptional writer and very smart i just need to focus. Ha like thats going to happen.

Twittng while history teacher is yaping away

I hate my history teacher. We all did the reports and he said: “These reports are all copy&paste.” And I was awake til 4am to do copy&paste?

Best new Facebook friend ever: my high school history teacher. Jealousy, ensue.

Why do people laugh when I say I wanna be a English or History teacher when I grow up?

does my history teacher get all his notes from Wikipedia? i looked up the Twenties and allll the terms and concepts we use are in here.

Begin a history teacher is a “look”, brown sweaters, jeans and bitching about capitalism all day.

Why did I get stuck with such a bad history teacher?On a better note my birthday is in five days.

So, in the interest of preparing for teaching a new course next year, and wanting to sort TED out a bit, I’ve created the following list based on disciplines (organizing knowledge or research by discipline is, it should be pointed out, in stark contrast to the real objective of TED Talks in general). I really like this TED fella, and I hope he doesn’t mind:)

At any rate, PLEASE PREVIEW THESE before showing them to students. These clips are intended for adults. I have seen most on my list, but couldn’t tell you in every case that I didn’t see or hear something that may be inappropriate for your classroom.

The data for this collection was taken from this Google Spreadsheet, which I received notice of in a tweet a few days ago. I have no idea who created the sheet, I’m certainly not taking the credit. I only searched through it and put together the following info. You should also know that this is not a complete list, there are many more TED Talks available on the web. Bionic Teaching has used the same sheet to create a great MIT Exhibit on, as far as I can tell, all of the TED Talks.

The interdisciplinary nature of TED (a direction I’d like to see education go in general) would allow many of these clips to cross several of my categories, so it may be useful for you to scan the lists of other disciplines. Enjoy!

I have the advantage of owning quite a few historical pieces, mostly due to the avid collecting of my father-in-law, and my chosen position of family archivist. What you may not be aware of is the number of students whose families are doing the same type of collecting. In fact, many of them may be in possession of items that living family members don’t even understand.

So, i decided to have a look at what’s out there among my students’ families. For the students who had nothing to offer, I simply allowed them to use artifacts or documents in my possession.

I already had a format for how to present the student work- a WordPress MU blog system I installed and administer for my school district. For more info on how that sort of thing is done, see these related WordPress posts: beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

The blog is also already used for my History and Technology Club (which I will explain in more detail in a later post), and so includes posts about club projects and tools.

So what sort of things did we come up with? I had students take digital pictures of their artifacts, and usually had them scan any documents. Most of the images and scans were then converted into “zoomable” web images, to allow the user to see the images in great detail without having to wait for large, high res images to load. Many of the documents include transcripts as part of the post written by students.

Here’s a sampling of the varied submissions (anything “old” or “antique” was accepted):

So what did students learn? First of all, they were genuinely excited about the fact that they were investigating items that few people had investigated before. Secondly, many of the items prompted very enlightening questions, like “How do I know this is not a fake?” or “How does this connect to a period, person, or place I learned about in history class?” or even “How much might this baby go for on Antiques Roadshow?”

Many of the posts enlightened the owners of the documents themselves, people who had held on to things important to their families, but had forgotten the historical context of the items. Nonetheless, we were all quite happy with the results. The blog itself won the local Regional High School Computer Fair for Curriculum Based Web Design, and the blog was one of the first times students at my school had done work that was actually made public on the internet. I’m sure to add more items to our little online museum next year, when I get new students (and new attics and basements for them to sort through!).

There is a growing movement among colleges and universities that is emphasizing the free availability of course materials. I find that many of my history and social studies colleagues are unaware of the expanding possibilities for a more in-depth investigation of their content.

Teaching a new course (I’m starting AP Human Geography next year)? Confused about a particularly intense section of your curriculum? Looking to excite students by introducing current research and controversy?

The following is certainly only a partial list, and I admit I’ve chosen a few due to personal fascination (I’m guessing the soap opera course and the pro wrestling course are remarkably similar). If you’re not impressed with my list, but you want to check more exhaustive lists of history offerings, look here and here.

In a future post, I plan to collect another list of resources from the recently established and exciting offerings of iTunes U.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Anthropology of Computing Technology and Culture

The Conquest of America

Technology in American History

Medieval Literature: Medieval Women Writers

American Soap Operas

Topics in Comparative Media: American Pro Wrestling

Videogame Theory and Analysis

How and Why Machines Work

Tufts University

Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Urban and Environmental Analysis

Perseus

UC Berkeley

Geography 20, 001

University of Massachusetts Boston

HIST 201 – Monarchs, People, and History , Summer 2008

HIST 304 – The Dark Ages , Summer 2008

HIST 313 – Nineteenth Century Europe

University of Notre Dame

AMST 30125 – Faith and the African American Experience

MI 40410 – Jews and Christians throughout History, Fall 2006

Utah State University

Guide to Writing in History, 2002

INST4010 – Principles and Practices of Technology, Spring 2008

INST5245 – Interactive Multimedia Production, Summer, 2008

INST7150 – Introduction to Open Education, Fall 2007

OER IID – Intro to Instructional Design, Spring 2005

Utah Valley State College

Teaching with Moodle

Using Moodle – A Brief Guide for Students

Long story made short, Wolfram Alpha is now live. It’s a bit more complex than your average search engine, so I’ll give you some examples of how it can be used in the History/Social Studies classroom. I’ll use a French Revolution bit of flavoring, since I’m up to my neck in it in class right now. You or your students can try out other content with the same search examples.

I got a little carried away with this, and it took a bit of time, probably due to the massive attempts at reaching Wolfram’s server.

If you discover some other neat and/or useful examples, please comment below!

If a 10 lb guillotine blade falls 12 ft, what’s the force?

When Louis XIV said “l’etat, c’est moi,” what was he?

On what day was the Bastille attacked, what day of the week was it, and exactly how long ago did it happen?

What did the calendar look like for that year?

On October 5, 1789, how far did the royal family have to march in humiliation from the palace at Versailles to the palace of the Tuileries in Paris?

Who was Robespierre?

How did he compare to Marat?

The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was 802 words in French. How many characters is that, how many pages, and how long would it take me to type it?

One of the products of the Revolutionaries was a new system of measurement based on the distance between the northernmost and southernmost points of France. How long was one of these units?

How many dollars of debt did each French person owe as a result of France’s support of the American Revolution?

The Revolution was greatly influenced by the price and availability of bread. How much nutritional value is in 2 slices of french bread?

If the people of France had followed Marie Antoinette’s advice (which she never actually said) “let them eat cake,” how much nutritional value would be in 2 pieces of cake?

I’m making a word puzzle for my students, what is an anagram for “cahiers?”

What is the difference between French and Napoleon Bonaparte’s native language?

What’s the geographic difference between Napoleon Bonaparte’s first place of exile (Elba) and the second (St. Helena)?

What’s the distance between Waterloo and St. Helena?

How much would that be in the revolutionary “meters?”

What does 7.451×10^6 meters mean?

How do I say that number?

What are two movies about the French Revolution, and how do they compare?

Was the Battle of Waterloo part of the Seven Years War? Can you prove it with a timeline?

Warning- drifting away from original focus…

Did the Holy Roman Empire exist at the same time as the Kingdom of Sicily?

Babe Ruth was paid $100,000 to play for the Yankees in 1920. How much would that be today?

How much was the same amount worth when Ruth died in 1948?

How much did Ruth make per hour?

Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were fifth cousins. What does that mean?

How many Roosevelts are there in the US?

Enjoy, and be patient. I’m hoping the system speeds up soon, and more options become available.

I’ve even had students use Captivate to create movies that explained new education technologies to teachers.

Fortunately, in recent years free online services are taking over the “screencast” biz. Captivate is still a fantastic application, and is now perfectly suited for high class “e-Learning” by institutions and businesses.

However, the simplicity and price of online screencasting services are a winner for teachers. After trying quite a few, Screencast-O-Matic.com is my favorite. It is incredibly simple to operate, and the screencasts can be exported to flash, quicktime,  and windows media.

Just to offer a wide range of options for teachers, JingProject.com and Copernicus also look interesting for free screen capture.

After unzipping the folder, you’ll see:

A .fla file for those of you with Flash. You may use or change this file in any way.

A .swf file. Opening this file will open the “Waves of Immigration” interactive file in Flash Player.

An .html file. Opening this file will open the “Waves of Immigration” interactivity in a browser window.

The interactive file is designed to allow students to investigate the four major waves of immigration to the US since 1492. Here’s the correctly finished activity (with room for discussion and/or argument):

These files can be used “as-is, “ or embedded in your own web page. Or, if you’ve read this far and you’re a bit confused, try the interactive activity online here.

Have fun!

Blogs, unlike textbooks, are communication devices used by persons of almost any interest, place of origin, and occupation on earth. To get a better idea of the wide world of blogs (also known as the “blogosphere”), I recommend using Google Reader. This service, offered for free by Google, requires only a registration, and an

interest in reading blogs. Google Reader is an aggregator, meaning that it gathers up all of the blog posts I’m interested in. It also tracks which posts I’ve read. My Google Reader watches about 200 blogs for me, without me ever having to visit each blog individually.

What is WordPress? WordPress is an open source application that provides all of a blog’s functions- writing, posting, linking, commenting, responding, and even extending a blog’s capabilities and appearance through plugins and themes. Because it’s open source, the code that runs WordPress is constantly improved by interested techies. For educators, the most important facet of open source applications is that they are free.

This blog is a WordPress installation. The blog I created and administered at

Dickinson College’s House Divided Project is a WordPress installation. The blogs I use with students and colleagues in my district are a part of a WordPressMU (multi-user) installation.

For more information on blogs, blogging, and WordPress, see 6 Reasons To Get Your Students Blogging, 5 teaching blogs you should be reading, Why use WPMU in K12?, and Step-by-step instructions to start a class blog.