New Cool Sites I've come across

History Buff - Narrated Panoramas of Historic Sites and More

History Buff is a neat website that teachers of US History should spend some time exploring. One of the best features of History Buff is a set of fifteen narrated panoramic tours of interesting and significant historic sites. Some of the panoramas you will find in the collection include Davy Crockett's childhood home, Appomattox Courthouse, Thomas Edison's birthplace, and Valley Forge.  I've tried to access this feature from within our virtual walls something is being blocked.  I am working on allowing access for this.

Another good feature of History Buff is their online newspaper archive. The archive is organized by year and event. The earliest newspapers in the archive were published in 1707. The newspapers can be viewed in great detail through the zoom tool accompanying each newspaper.

Here is a cool blogpost that had some interesting facts about Sarah Gudger, the amazing 121 year old woman featured in the ex-slave narratives, http://gulahiyi.blogspot.com/2008/02/sarah-gudger-rest-of-story.html 

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html 

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress and includes more than 200 photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division that are now made available to the public for the first time. Born in Slavery was made possible by a major gift from the Citigroup Foundation.

http://www.free.ed.gov/index.cfm

FREE or Federal Resources for Educational Excellence, is a U.S. Department of Education website that compiles free teacher resources available from dozens of federal agencies. Educators can sign up for the FREE RSS feed, which notifies users when new resources are added. Otherwise, they can browse by topic, from music history to life sciences.

http://civilwaranimated.com/--

Welcome to Civil War Animated

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good animation is worth ten thousand. After reading book after book about the US Civil War and finding only complicated maps with dotted lines and dashed lines crisscrossing the pages, we decided to depict the key naval and land battles using animation technology.

Experience History as it Happens

Maybe we need to find content that lets our students experience how historical events really happened, such as can be found in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum’s “We Choose the Moon” (<wechoosethemoon.org>). At this site, users listen to the actual commentaries from Houston as Apollo 11 is launched.
Users can watch and hear what happened on their own time by clicking through the stages and on different galleries.

Virtual Museums and Galleries

Schools are cutting back on field trips because of limited funds.  Students now can navigate around exhibits right from their desktop with videoconferencing and links such as:

• Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night from the Museum of
Modern Art (MoMa) <www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/
2008/vangoghnight/flashsite/index.html>

•Exploratorium: the museum of science, art and human
perception <www.exploratorium.edu>

• Color, Contrast & Dimension in News Design by Poynter.
org <poynterextra.org/cp/colorproject/color.html>

Learn by Doing

There are numerous online activities where learners of all ages can
learn by involving themselves in hands-on activities.

• Design a Panda Habitat by National Zoo
<nationalzoo.si.edu/Education/ConservationCentral/design/default.cfm>

• Virtual Dinosaur Dig by Smithsonian Museum
<www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/games/#archaeology/>

Play while Learning

Most students play games, so why not introduce games into your
learning repertoire?
• Saibai Island Canoe from the National Museum of Australia <www.nma.gov.au/kidz/learn_and_play/saibai_island_canoe/>

• Maryland Budget Game from University of Baltimore <iat.ubalt.edu/MDBudgetGame/>

Interact with Videos and Audio

Reach those students who are auditory and kinesthetic learners with multimedia.
• Math Tutorials at Brightstorm
<www.brightstorm.com/d/math/>

• How Your Brain Understands What your Ear Hears by NIH
<science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih3/hearing/
activities/activities_toc.htm>

You as the teacher can be the instructional designer creating a learning environment that is engaging and challenging. You can set the pace and rhythm, vary the format of the instruction you deliver, give the learner control, and make learning fun: fun for your students and fun for you.  I recommend that teachers build their own PLNs with other teachers and instructional designers, where everyone collects rich curriculum and learning activities to share with each other. Use social media and your network to learn about new resources, bookmark and tag them in <del.icio.us> or Diigo (<www.diigo.com>), and then share them with your students in an organized way that enhances your instruction. There is no reason to reinvent learning activities if they are already available!
This article was provided by Barbara Bray.  Barbara Bray writes a regular column on professional development for OnCUE, is President/Founder of My eCoach (<my-ecoach.com>), and blogs about adult learners, coaching, and changing education now at (<barbarabray.my-ecoach.com>). Twitter: bbray