MHSSocSt

Free images for your inspiration, reference and use in your creative work, be it commercial or not!

Another source of photos for projects that aren't restricted by copyright

"Wolfram|Alpha has the ability to compute some interesting information about school districts. You can now use Wolfram|Alpha to analyze and compare data on student-teacher ratios, expenditures, revenues, and salaries in more than 18,000 public school districts in the United States."

Not strictly for social studies; could be useful for analyzing ed data

Blip Snips is an easy to use web tool that lets users create a video bookmark and then share specific parts of a video. Creating video tags or bookmarks allows users to find content quickly and efficiently. This is also an easy way to edit out some of the extraneous content of a video that might be great in the classroom.

Could be useful for showing video clips in the class.

"Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, a new policy paper by Renee Hobbs, Professor at the School of Communications and the College of Education at Temple University and founder of its Media Education Lab, proposes a detailed plan that positions digital and media literacy as an essential life skill and outlines steps that policymakers, educators, and community advocates can take to help Americans thrive in the digital age."

Recap of news stories from the week. Source to review current events with students

" The photography of the Civil War is perhaps the single most important element that stimulates our interest in the conflict. Yet no aspect of the war is so routinely taken for granted. Most Civil War books that feature original war photographs use them exclusively as illustrations and ignore the underlying story of how and why the images were made."

RT @freeresources: MLK Teaching Resources: speeches, bio, civil rights movement historic places, and more. http://go.usa.gov/r6X #MLK

Capture sections of youtube video

Principal's remarks about the tragedy in Tuscon.

Leveraging the power of students in the classroom.

Comprehensive site for information on Google Earth

Greeat resource for Google Earth

Sites uses popular music to teach history. School librarian Joyce Valenza writes: "An article in the December 30 Washington Post turned me on to an amazing creative effort developed by a couple of teachers in Hawaii. History for Music Lovers on YouTube is song parody and remix at its most useful. The portal was launched by clever and talented Amy Burvall, of the Le Jardin Academy in Kailua, and Herb Mahelona, who used to work with her, at St. Andrew's Priory in Honolulu. I can see using these as models for creative student research projects. The clever remixing here also seems a cool way of examining transformativeness (repurposing and adding value) as it relates to fair use."... School Library Journal: NeverEndingSearch, Dec. 31; Washington Post, Dec. 30; History for Music Lovers

Watch these and imagine the possibilities in your class!

I asked a social studies teacher, "who's the historian in your classroom?" After a bit of give and take, we concluded that in the traditional classroom, the students get to watch (and listen) to the teacher be historian

This year, I've designed non-exams for my Human Geo students that will assess their ability to apply what they've learned over the course of the year to real-world problems using full open access to the Net as well as collaboration with their peers during "exam time".

"I resolve to embrace a sense of vuja dé. We've all experienced déjà vu-looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you've seen it before. Vuja dé is the flip side of that-looking at a familiar situation (an industry you've worked in for decades, problems you've worked on for years) as if you've never seen it before, and, with that fresh line of sight, developing a distinctive point of view on the future. The challenge for all of us is that too often, we let what we know limit what we can imagine. This is the year to face that challenge head-on."

"Here are some of his main ideas, in italics, with my thoughts interspersed. * 1. Why do we use report cards and assign grades to students' work? * 2. What purpose should report cards or grades serve? * 3. What elements should teachers use in determining students' grades? * We don't agree on the purpose of grades. That's the first problem. The various purposes are at adds with another."

"Mashpedia is an interesting service that matches reference articles from Wikipedia to materials from other sources like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, and the web in general. The purpose of drawing materials from multiple sources is to provide users with a comprehensive view of current news "

Save, organize, and share your research

Blekko aims to show search results from only useful, trustworthy sites.

Alternative search engine. Provides much more targeted results than google.