May

31

Being a knight

Filed Under Social Studies | Leave a Comment

When covering the Middle Ages with my students, I often have them draw up a coat of arms or crest of some kind. They need a suitable decoration (a bird or lion or something) on the front, and a slogan to go with it, preferably in Latin.

I’ve usually had a hard time getting across what it should look like, largely because most Grade 8 kids have never looked closely at a coat of arms and I don’t have a lot of examples to show them.

Says-It.com comes to my rescue with their Official Seal Generator. It’s a cool little site that let’s you take the basic elements of a coat of arms and combine them in different ways to create your own, unique crest. If you need a unique slogan, a link is provided to Wikipedia’s List of Latin Phrases, many of which are perfect for just this kind of activity.

Of course, there’s a lot of possible combinations of animals and slogans on the crest that would be inappropriate, even crude, but that can easily happen without this shield generating tool.

I’m looking forward to trying this with my class.

May

29

Making Student Council elections interactive

Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment

I tried an experiment today. Our school is holding elections for next year’s student council. Usually that’s pretty boring. A large number of very similar posters plaster the halls for a week, and then everyone votes for whoever’s the most popular.

I encouraged my class to try something different and, with some help from me, one student did. Using the Play My Game site, the student added her picture to an image of Superman, and threw it into a game which she then put into a simple website. She plastered the school with small signs that read: “For a Real Superhero” and included the site URL. She did not add her name or the position she was running for.

I doubt it will change the result of the election (high school elections tend to be popularity contests) but it has gotten quite a few students curious and has gotten this “superhero” girl a little more attention than she’d otherwise have. Adding a little Web 2.0 to student council elections adds interest.

May

24

The future that never was

Filed Under History, Social Studies | Leave a Comment

Probably one of the most intriguing concepts is how people in the past looked at their future, or what may be our now. Some of their predictions were wildly off, and some, not too surprisingly, were bang on.

Paleo-Future is a blog devoted to exactly the concept of wondering what was going to be. It digs through a lot of archival material to offer some really neat glimpses of the perceived future. One of the cooler ones may be this series of postcards that showed what was believed to come.

This site offers a really neat way to get into the minds of people from the past, or to start a discussion of what the future might be, or perhaps should be. It’s a blog full of unique primary source material that helps make history just a little bit cooler than it already is.

May

23

Bibme

Filed Under English, General, History, Social Studies | Leave a Comment

Bibme is another cool online bibliographic tool. Like Ottobib, it helps you look up the relevant details for a bibliography entry in a number of different styles. Ottobib allows you to search for books using the ISBN number, but Bibme lets you do that and do title, author and other details. It even allows you to search for newspaper and magazine article titles (though one wonders just how up to date you can keep a list like that, but you never know nowadays).

They should be a really useful tool in the student’s and teacher’s arsenal.

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