AccuTeach could be a nice place to find other educators with whom you can share lesson ideas and materials. As the video above points out, the blog and calendar option is useful for keeping parents informed of their students' assignments.
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to integrate History Buff into the classroom: History Buff is a website that can help history come to life through story, virtual tours, audio and primary source news papers. I suspect that most students fall into the judge-a-site-by-it's-cover category like me. For this reason, if I was using it in my classroom, I wouldn't send students directly to the website to do a lot of digging on their own. Instead, I might direct them to the portion of the site I knew we would be using through a classroom website, wiki, blog or use a Weblist or Symbaloo to link to them. It is amazing how changing something as small as the entry point into a site can change a students attitude about the site (heck, I'm like that too!).
Once I got into History Buff, I really appreciated the connection to primary sources and the way that the "actual" newspapers bring history to life. I REALLY liked the hoaxes in news section and suspect that students will get a kick out of it to. Your kids will be asking, how can people be SO gullible? These kinds of stories are wonderful discussion starters and will make students think critically about their own news media. As a fun extension, have your students write their own hoax news stories.
Okay, now for demystifying the navigation of this site. See the itty bitty brown words in the left sidebar that are all squished together? That is the navigation. For real. I didn't notice it at first either! Go ahead and click on one to test it out…not so bad when you know what you are looking for, right? Right. For your convenience, I'm linking to each page of the site below so you can easily find what you are looking for. :)
Online Newspaper Archives
Historic Panoramas
Reference Libraries (audio resources, hoaxes)
Primary Source Material
State Facts
Interactive Quizzes
Tips: History Buff has a newsletter you can subscribe to if you are, you know, a history buff. Just enter your email in that box under the header and clic
Check out this site for great educational material -suggested Websites and lesson plans - in literature/language arts, art/culture, social studies/history and foreign language.
It never fails-you're gathering materials for an upcoming class or presentation and all you can find is the pdf version of an important document. You need to make some changes but that is not easily done in PDF format, so what do you do?
Most of the material on The Why Files is geared toward an elementary and middle school audience. The teachers' section of The Why Files offers pdf guides and quizzes that you can use to teach the science of the stories featured on the front page of The Why Files. The Why Files could also be a good resource for students to explore independently or with their parents.