by fifer1863 on February 7, 2012
Kevin Honeycutt has developed an excellent website for integrating technology to teach the Civil War. This collaborative learning project is focused around the H.L. Hunley, the famous Confederate submarine. This website is provides an in depth look into the history of the H.L. Hunley along with providing a great collection of links, photographs and videos. Let’s take a look at some of the different pages and sections of the site.
According to the page, the challenge for students is to “Partner up with another classroom and create a ten minute documentary telling the story of the H.L. Hunley.” The photos section of the website provides a nice collection of photographs related to the Hunley along with some additional links to Hunley related lesson plans. The Starter Videos Section provides links to a few videos related to the Hunley along with a great article about how Archeology Meets Technology. Finally, the Hunley Blog page contains a place where students place their artifacts, discuss their projects, share photos along with sharing their research and findings.
There is a great quote by Kevin on the website that says, “By allowing kids to collaborate with others online we allow learners to build and flex new muscles. These muscles will serve them well for the rest of their lives!” I could not agree more.
Here are some additional websites related to the Hunley for your viewing pleasure:
UPDATED: Check out Kevin’s Tell the Story of the Hunley PBL site
Until next time…
by fifer1863 on May 24, 2011
As part of the 150th Civil War celebration, the Washington Post has created a special Civil War 150 website to share articles and resources related to the Civil War. One of these is resources is an interactive map that shows battles and casualties from the war.
Once you play the movie, you start to see red dots appear on the screen indicating where a particular battle took place and the extent of the casualties. The size of the red circle displays the number of casualties from less than 250 to 50,000. At any time during the movie you can pause the movie and then hover over a red dot to learn more about the particular battle the date of the battle and the casualties. If you notice the bar graph at the top of the page, you can also hover over the different bars to learn about the number of battles and casualties in a particular month / year. You can also view the red dots by year.
Applications for the classroom:
- Have groups of students pick a particular year and write a summary of different battles and stats from that year
- Ask probing questions like why were there fewer battles in December, January and February?
- Have your students pick some battles based on different criteria and located them in Google Earth
- Based on information by year or over all four years, talk about why particular battles were fought in certain geographic locations. For example, why were there so many in Missouri in 1861?
Just a few ideas. Be sure to explore the rest of the Civil War 150 website for more resources.
Until Next time…
by fifer1863 on April 11, 2011
The following post is from guest blogger Joe Phelan who is with the National Endowment for the Humanities which runs the EDSITEment website. Joe wanted to share some of the Civil War related resources available through EDSITEment with everyone. Please welcome Joe and let’s hope this becomes a series of posts.
[click to continue…]
