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Today’s Document: History through cartoons

What it is: Today’s Document is an awesome daily history site that I learned about from the Instructify blog written by Bill Ferris.  Today’s Document is based on the RSS feed from the National Archives. Jon White takes these daily documents from history and turns them into cartoons that illustrate the history.  Cartoons and drawings offer such an incredible and striking visual to accompany history.  They help flesh out what was happening and give students a way to connect to and characterize history. How to integrate Today’s Document into your curriculum: This is, simply stated, an AWESOME site.  I have mentioned before that history was not my strength in school.  I struggled with finding the story in history.  For me it was a lot of facts, dates, names, and places that I couldn’t seem to get a handle on.  A site like Today’s Document would have done wonders for my understanding of history.  The visuals clearly connect the facts with a larger story.  Even better, White publishes the story behind each cartoon along side it.  Today’s Document makes an incredible e-textbook complete with daily updates, links to videos, articles, primary sources, and additional opportunities to learn more about each topic.  Today’s Document would make a fantastic discussion starter in any classroom.  It’s natural fit would be in the history or civics class but could really be used in many disciplines including literature, writing, and even science.  Because Today’s Document uses cartoons to tell history, the site can be used with a wide range of age groups.  Even young students can look at the cartoons and follow the story each day.  Each drawing is linked to the original primary source document on National Archives with an invitation to dig deeper.  Within the preamble describing the cartoon, White often includes links to outside videos and articles that reinforce the daily document. Tips: I encourage you to take a look at White’s previous cartoons, you can do so by using the “previous” button or searching the archives by date.  He started this project in January 2010. Please leave a comment and share how you are using Today’s Document in your classroom!

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Gooru: Fantastic new education search engine

Posted by admin | Posted in Classroom Management, Interactive Whiteboard, Knowledge (remember), Math, Middle/High School, Open Source, Science, Teacher Resources, Understand (describe, explain), video, Video Tutorials, Websites | Posted on 12-07-2012

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What it is:  Gooru is a education search engine for learning that helps teachers find standards aligned content and study guides.  5th-12th grade math and science topics are covered and include resources like digital textbooks, animations and instructor videos.  Gooru provides a place to connect with your worldwide personal learning network to share and ask questions.  Gooru is not just for teachers, students can use the study guides and self assessments to guide learning.  Based on the topics studied and the performance on self-assessments, Gooru begins to suggest resources and study guides to help gain mastery.

Gooru takes advantage of OER (Open Educational Resources) so that all content delivered can be accessed free of charge.

You can explore Gooru through resources, collections, quizzes, a standards library or a search engine.

How to integrate Gooru into the classroom: Gooru is a great step toward helping you personalize the learning experience for your students.  Use Gooru to find resources for your classroom and for individual students.  Invite students to create their own logins so that they can setup Gooru to be tailored to their specific needs.  As they study and take quizzes, Gooru gets “smarter” and begins to recommend content for them.

Gooru is ideal in a 1 to 1 classroom set up.  If you don’t have 1 to 1 access, much of the content can be shared using an interactive whiteboard or projector-connected computer.  Because of the nature of Gooru, it could be a great addition to the flipped classroom model.

Tips:  Gooru is currently in beta, sign up to help them test it out and make it better today!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Gooru  in  your classroom!

Comments (1)

Linda said on 13-07-2012

The home page remains on the screen (ipad2) behind text and images of the other linked pages after I click on them. In othe words I see two pages layered one on top of the other.

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