I found this online clock and wished I’d had it years ago. Why would a high school history teacher want a clock? Well, I also teach some French, and every so often I have to teach the kids how to tell time in French. That’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do.

Why? I have to be honest. I can’t draw a clock to save my life. To get the clock reasonably circular and the hands about the right length is an enormous challenge for me. That’s kind of sad, I know. As well, it’s awkward to draw a clock on the board and repeatedly erase and then redraw the hands.

With this clock, if you have a projector in your room, the clock can be projected on the screen and adjusted by minutes or hours. What’s really useful is that you can flip between an analog display with a face and hands, and a digital display. In this age of digital watches, it’s surprising how many students don’t know how to read a clock face and can only tell time using a digital format. This allows you to use both at once.

Whether you’re teaching primary kids to tell time, or FSL (or other second language students) to tell time in French, this is a nice tool.

It’s the second day of a two day workshop on digital photography. I decided to take it parly because photography interests me, partly because it has some payback at school (I can help out the yearbook photographers a bit), and partly because as a teacher you always need to be a learner.

It always amazes me just how much there is to learn about all this technology you can use at school. I’ve picked up a fair bit of knowledge regarding cool web applications, and I have some idea how the school network works (though not as much as I’d like), but I’ve been learning a ton about just how my digital camera works.

It keeps you humble. No matter how much I know, I never know it all and I’m always a learner, a beginner.

Okay, it’s David Letterman, but this top ten list is still funny. It’s also surprisingly true.

BTW, if you check my blog regularly, you’ll notice that an awful lot of the cool videos I find are on TeacherTube. It’s definitely a site worth checking out if you’re looking for different sort of educational material.

I’m a great fan of using primary sources in class, so I was pleased to find out that both the National Archives of Canada and the U.S. have some very impressive collections online.

The Canadian collection, called Collections Canada, is solid covering a wide variety of topics with probably thousands of scanned pictures available online. The What We Have: On Our Website link allows you to easily search the entire collection of cool Canadian resources.

The American archives are a little different. The Digital Vaults are a vast array of cool flash effects as pictures representing archival records shuffle their way around the screen. You can select one of those, or shuffle the records to get a new batch to pick from. If you’re not searching for anything in particular, this gives you a fascinating way to randomly pick an event, photo, or document in American history. If you’re more of a traditionalist, there is an option to search. I was having some difficulty operating it, but kids would probably figure it out in a hurry.

Both Canada and the U.S. have impressive online collections. I suspect the Canadian one is bigger because I think they started earlier. The American one, because of its design, is more likely to appeal to the teenage set and the Canadian one to us conservative, older folks. Either way, I’m excited that those dusty, allergy-irritating archives are out in the sunlight (or monitor light?) where people can get at them.

As a lover of all things historical, I’m into primary sources. I think it’s neat to see how people acted, or felt at a certain time, as written in their own words. Unfortunately, not all students like primary sources as much as I do. Go figure.

Historical Scene Investigation attempts to provide some support for investigations into American history using primary sources. Topics covered so far include desegregation of schools, events at Jamestown, and when Elvis met Nixon.

In each case there’s a problem to solve or a question to answer. There are supporting documents for students to read, and hints and ideas to help teachers guide their students through the process.

There’s a fair number of primary source documents that are scans of the originals, which is nice. Not all are, however, but this may have been unavoidable.

All in all, it looks like a nice resource for American history teachers.