GREAT video for teaching the State of the Union

Tomorrow is President Obama's State of the Union Address, and if you are teaching anything with government or political science, I hope that you will be bringing it up, if not teaching it directly.

I found this excellent video from ABC news, that covers the history of the State of the Union, recent trends, and the role of the State of the Union in American politics.

Personally I will be showing this 3 1/2 minute video tomorrow to introduce my students to the purpose and history of the state of the Union, before requiring my students to watch the address itself tomorrow evening either on television or streaming online.

For those of you with access to the Methods fileshare, I have uploaded a State of the Union Address Viewing Guide to the Assignments folder. 

ABC News History of State of the Union

British Library Timelines: Sources from History

If you have ever wished that you could just leap through some of the most important written works in history like the pages of a book, now is your chance!

The British Library has been generous enough to create an interactive, 3d timeline that includes some of the most influential written works in the history of the world, laying them out across time and space, and sortable by topic and category. Not only can students (or teachers) see how these different documents related to each other across time, but from within the timeline you can open up the documents themselves, and see high-res scanned copies of documents such as the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks, the Declaration of Independence, and original Sherlock Holmes manuscripts.

All of these documents that normally are secured in London, at your fingertips and available to your students through the generosity of the British Library.

Struggling with Grading? UW-Stout can help

I've sometimes found myself having difficulty coming up with rubrics for certain assignments I give out, or uncertain of what criteria I should use while grading a given paper or project. While I don't specifically endorse any of the resources listed on this site, just like with any other material in our practice, it is my opinion that by examining a variety of models, we as teachers can develop our own best practice.

The University of Wisconsin-Stout has provided access to quite a few "Online Assessment Resources for Teachers", including examples of rubrics, authentic assessment criteria, and recommendations for creating meaningful assessments.

Council on Foreign Relations | Primary document resource for political science and government

This is a GREAT trove of primary source documents related to foreign affairs and foreign US policy in the relatively recent past (this includes head of state addresses, government reports, legislative resolutions, etc), collected by the organization that publishes the well respected journal Foreign Affairs.

Documents can be searched and organized by geographic region, topical issue, date, or type.

Council on Foreign Relations: Essential Documents

InformationIsBeautiful.net | Visualizing data as an artform

This is without a doubt the best source I have ever found for examining complicated data in easy to understand fashion. If you have been to a bookstore in the past year and seen the book The Visual Miscellaneum, this is the guy who wrote that book!

This can be an invaluable resource for teaching such complicated topics as:

political ideology...

climate change...

global economies... 

and so much more.

I've already been able to pull entire lessons out of these graphics, and just having one of these images as my desktop got my students talking when I was transferring from a powerpoint to a website.

I can't think of a more ringing endorsement than the fact that high school students thought it was fun and exciting to talk about global market dynamics and censorship based off a picture they saw in passing.

Information is Beautiful.net

For those of us teaching in public schools in Pennsylvania | PA Dept Ed. new aligned standards website!

And by "new" I mean that this was rolled out sometime in August/September, but it's still a nifty site to remember. Individual standards are sortable by grade and subject, making it extremely handy for lesson planning, and also determining what you still have to teach for the rest of the year.

Finishing the Dream

In honor of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr's birthday this week, I wanted to share the Finishing the Dream archive, which is a great resource on teaching civil rights. It has a variety of primary and secondary source videos (importantly they are NOT on youtube but rather it's hosted by NBC, so you should be able to access them from the schools):

This actually part of the much larger resource hosted by NBC called NBC Learn, which has a vast archive of educational and historical video for use by teachers and students:

Murphy's Laws of Teaching

Do you think you have problems in the classroom? Well it could be much, much worse. Because everything that can go wrong eventually will.

Murphy's laws of Teaching

Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration

Great hook to pull kids into talking about the Declaration of Independence, or the Revolution in general. Personally I think the production value is higher than the original by Justin Timberlake.

Extremely clever song, and well worth a listen!

Top 48 ads that would never be allowed today

Do you think ads today are racy? Too revealing for young children? Offensive? You have no idea.

A bit hat tip to Mark for this link, to some of the most dated ads from the mid-20th century I have ever seen. I have actually used a significant portion of these in the past week of my New American Studies class, in a unit that I call "Selling the Sixties: Advertising Social Change in an Age of Free Love." For the intro lesson, I provided students with a certain advertisement, and had them inform me what decade they believed it was produced in, and justify their answer.

Some of the reactions not surprisingly were pretty amusing among the students, who were really amused at how outdated the ads were, and how ineffective they would be at selling anything today

Top 48 ads that would never be allowed today

TeachingHistory.org | Home of the National History Education Clearinghouse

Not surprisingly, anything that involves the words "History" and "clearinghouse" in the same phrase catches my eye pretty quickly, and this site is well worth the time.

Offering a wide range of teaching materials, history content, and examples of teaching techniques, the National History Education Clearinghouse should be a resource that every history teacher stores in their pocket full of tricks when having difficulty creating a tough lesson, or finding a new way to teach content.

Teaching History.org

Lost Generation

Teaching Genocide | Resources from Luke, Judith, and Ryan

Teaching genocide in any historical period, be it in ancient history, during the Holocaust, or in recent times, is an incredibly difficult challenge.

Some of these links are for organizations that are actively advocating against ongoing genocides, others are historical resources.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Movement

Genocide Intervention Network

The Ladder of Prejudice

Darfur Now

CNN Presents: Scream Bloody Murder

Facing History and Ourselves | Helping classrooms and communities worldwide link the past to moral choices today

A great resource for teaching civil rights, activism, decision making, and a variety of other difficult topics.

The "Educator Resources" will be most helpful for you, including prepared lesson/unit plans, Moral Dilemmas today, and teaching strategies.

It takes some time to learn how to navigate around the site, but it is worth it especially if you are teaching hot button issues such as the Holocaust, Civil Rights, immigration, or even trying to have in depth discussions of bullying.

FacingHistory.org

C-SPAN Classroom | Free Primary Source Materials For Social Studies Teachers

Not surprisingly, C-Span has a really helpful website chock full of videos of pretty much everything we might need as current or future social studies teachers.

Political Science, Economics, History, Government, Media... it's all here!

It's a classic, and a pretty basic resource, but if you don't have it bookmarked and search for videos here regularly, you are missing out.

And of course the most valuable aspect of this site? School district firewalls won't block this website, unlike youtube....

C-SPAN Classroom

Daily political cartoons on any topic

So my classroom mentor uses political cartoons constantly in class, and I've begun to do the same in our Social Science class.  I will actually be creating an ongoing assignment for my students in the next week or so, who from February-March will be finding one political cartoon per week, and will be writing about the political commentary in each cartoon (maybe even in a blog that I have them create....? I'll update you on how this goes).

This site provides a massive quantity of indexed, cross referenced, and highly informative political cartoons on a huge variety of subjects. You can search for nearly anything that is political, and probably will find a wealth of cartoons that you could use in a class.

This site even allows you to subscribe to a daily email list, but I have to admit it has just gone into my spam filter for the past few weeks, and I haven't noticed the loss. So I leave that decision up to you.

www.cagle.com

The Evolution of US Political Parties, 1788-1840

This is one of the best resources I have found to explain the changing political parties of the United States over time to students. When trying to explain to students the difference between political ideology and political parties, I pulled up some of these images to show that while there have always been liberals and conservatives over time, the terms "Democrat" and "Republican" are relatively new terms, and their relation to the ideologies has drastically shifted in the past two centuries.

Timeline of Political Parties in the US 1788-1840

Timeline of Political Parties in the US 1820-1860

Timeline of Political Parties in the US 1896-1929