Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Wikis in Canada

When you are watching the following video ignore the camping theme and think about it in terms of classrooms sharing their history projects. Canada is a huge country and students don't have a lot of opportunities to meet other young people from other parts of the country. Why not partner with another school and see what you can put together?

Canada's National History Society recently announced it's finalists for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Excellence in Teaching Canadian History. Check out the project of Gale Walker and Toby Daigle. Teaching from Manitoba and New Brunswick, these two teachers who have never met created a great project.

The software is out there to do these projects and it can be a rewarding process. Most importantly, the technology shouldn't over power the history that you are teaching - which in the end is clearly the most important thing.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Google Maps: Canada at War

With Remembrance Day coming up soon there are some really interesting opportunities to learn about military history through Google Maps. Often students are given photocopies of maps and asked to use pencil colors to map out battles or an entire war.

With Google Maps students can create their own maps of the war. They can use battalion, unit, and individual diaries to provide information about locations. In this case I've created a demonstration using a really general map of D-Day, but you can really be as specific as you want depending on the source.

You can also use these to track aircraft flights and convoy routs, or follow an individual soldier through the entire war - Where were they stationed stationed? What Battles did they participate in?

Not only is this more fun that pencil crayons, but your students will also be creating a map that can actually be of help to people visiting those sites. And, while I've started in Europe, there is no shortage of military history sites in Canada that can also be used.


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Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Denominators killed the Digital Historian

Science and math should have no claims on new technology, see below.

If you ever consider anything like this for your classroom, you're in the 1980s (wait for the music and you'll know what I mean). But you may want to check out teachertube.com