Our group chose to look at a website provided by Rasmussen college, it is a listing along with brief descriptions of 100 applications that tech savvy teachers could use in the classroom. Included among the listing are quite a few tools that we have looked at in our class already, as well as many quite useful tools that we have not yet explored. There are tools with which you can create and generate online tests and quizzes, administrative tools that could be used for filing daily information such as attendance, grades, assignment tracking, etc., a myriad of research tools, online curriculum pages, lesson planning pages, virtual debating forums, and many many more. We each chose to focus our attention on one particular tool, I chose an online historical document tool called footnote.
Footnote.com is a research tool that contains more than 70 million original historical documents and photos. Being an avid lover and student of history, I certainly know just how important it is to have reliable sources from which to pull research data. With footnote.com, many of the historical documents are from such renowned institutions as the National Archives, and the Library of Congress. Information on the site in bundled by sections or by historical eras, such as the Civil War period, The Holocaust Collection, World War II, Vietnam, Native American Collection, Black History, A Newspapers Archive, and an Interactive Census Project. The Interactive Census Project is particularly interesting in that it allows you to find and search information pertaining to census data all the way back to the year 1860. This particular tool could be used in math classes, geography classes, government/political courses, and particularly history courses.
Perusing through the site, I myself was able to search military and pension records from the time of the second world war, and find three separate documents detailing enlistment information and other data pertaining to my grandfathers' brother, my great uncle, who was killed in action flying a B-29 Liberator over German skies in 1944. It was incredible to be able to print this information out and show it to my grandfather, as well as to now be able to add it to all of the original military documents I have from my grandfather.
The Newspaper Archives section I found to be equally as interesting. There are literally hundreds of thousands of articles listed from newspapers all over the country. If a student wants to research the political views expressed in the New York Herald during the Roosevelt Administration, the information is only a few clicks away. You simply type in keywords or phrases, individual newspaper names or search the entire archive, and period of time you would like to search. This will bring up any article which would contain pertinent information to your search. I really liked that it shows you an image of the exact article, almost as if you are holding the actual newspaper right in front of you, and it even highlights the information regarding your search, allowing you to zoom in and out on the page. I encourage all of you to check this site out for useful information to use in your digital textbook chapters, I certainly found a wealth of information to include in mine.
This sounds so interesting! This website seems like it would supplement what sometimes libraries lack. The fact that it is free and students would be able to use it at home (unlike some websites that the school pays for and students can only access at school). I really like that the census records are there because that would make a fantastic math project. I think that it is also convenient that this site has Newspaper Archives so that students can see what is written about an issue from multiple perspectives. Sounds like a great site.
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