Keeping Score – Study the Symphony:

“The San Francisco Symphony’s website Keeping Score is up for a Webby Award this year. Keeping Score is a comprehensive website full of educational materials about composers, scores, musical techniques, and symphonies.

There are two elements of Keeping Score that should be of particular interest to educators. The most immediately accessible section of Keeping Score is the interactive education elements that contain videos, images, and texts that tell the stories of composers. The interactive section also features explanations of musical techniques, the history of notable events and themes in the symphonic world, and analysis of various scores.

The second section of Keeping Score that teachers will be drawn to is the lesson plan library. In the lesson plan library teachers will find lesson plans developed to incorporate elements of the Keeping Score website. There are lesson plans appropriate for every grade level.

Applications for Education

What I like about Keeping Score is that while the materials are obviously appropriate for music classes, there are also materials that could be used in a social studies classroom. The stories of composers and the history section provide teachers with opportunities to talk about what was going on in the world when the composers were creating their scores and how that may have affected what the composers created.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.com.)

“Yesterday, while exploring Time’s website I came across this timeline featuring the key decisions made by President Roosevelt during World War II. The World at War is an interactive timeline in which you can click on any of the key decisions listed to learn more about those decisions. The decisions interspersed amongst other key events of WWII. None of the events are terribly detailed, but the timeline does provide a nice general overview.

Applications for Education

The World at War could be a good introductory resource or review resource for US History teachers and their students. Teachers could have each student in a class select an item from the timeline to research and teach to their classmates. ”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)

TIME Magazine Interactive World at War Timeline

Thanks to FreeTech4Teachers for finding this site.

Playing History: Your Source for Historical Games: ”

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Looking for a way to spice up your social studies or history class? Check this out! Way back in July, Richard Byrne blogged about this site: ‘Playing History.’ I loved it and tagged it, knowing I’d want to share it here. Finally had a chance to check it out, and yep – it’s worth a closer look!

Basically, http://playinghistory.org/ is a site that aggregates games about history as submitted by people all over the web. A tag cloud is featured prominently as a the main interface for locating games but you can also search. Here’s a shot of the American History collection:

A handy rating system allows you to quickly see which of these games were popular (or not).  Then you are only two mouse clicks away from the actual game, located somewhere on the Internet. Drilling into the listing yields a detail page with lots of helpful information:

Quality of the games can vary widely, however. I started playing ‘Do I Have a Right?’ and couldn’t stop! It was terrific! A few others I clicked on were more like interactive websites than games, but, it’s easy to make those determinations.

I like this site because it’s easy to use and helps you locate engaging activities tied to your curriculum. And, of course, the site itself and the games located are free!”

(Via NCS-Tech.)

Learn About The Nobel Prize:

“As you’ve probably heard by now, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 has been awarded to President Barack Obama. This announcement will undoubtedly create good conversation in current events classes. Your students will probably have questions about the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Foundation has created a Nobel Peace Prize fact sheet to help visitors learn more about the history of the prize and to address some frequently asked questions. The Nobel Peace Prize website also offers videos of lectures given by past recipients of the prize.

The Nobel Foundation has an educational games site designed to help students learn about the work of past Nobel Prize recipients from a variety of fields. For example, there is a game for learning about Pavlov’s dogs.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)

“The video is believed to contain the only film images of Anne Frank. The video was uploaded to YouTube by the Anne Frank Museum.

Applications for Education

The video could be valuable for anyone teaching lessons on WWII and the Holocaust. The film, recorded in 1941 according to the Guardian, represents the time in Frank’s life before going into hiding. One simple activity you could do with this video is ask students why recording this film wouldn’t have been possible later in Frank’s life.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)

“US Government Studies Games Law Focused Education, a subsidiary of the State Bar of Texas, has developed some good games about US Government. Law Focused Education has thirteen games that could be used in Civics and Social Studies classrooms across the United States. There are three additional games that are specific to Texas.

The games offered by Law Focused Education cover topics like the Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Branches of Government. One topic addressed by Law Focused Education that you don’t often see turned into a game is Federalists v. Anti-Federalists.

Thanks to Anne Marie at Talking SMARTBoards for the tip.

Applications for Education
Law Focused Education’s games could be excellent review games for use in Civics and US History classes. In fact, I linked one of the games to the blog for my own class.”

(Via Free Tech 4 Teachers.)