I’ve been rather quiet this semester – I’ve been taking classes myself, actually.  In theory, I should be so professionally developed right now that I could pass, in fact, as an actual professional!  All joking aside, I’ve been taking some MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) specifically looking at how we teach in the digital age.  And, I’ve been so inspired, I’m almost overwhelmed where to start using the approaches and technology I’ve been introduced to.

As a pedagogical reminder, students generally respond well to moments of play – and moments of creation within that play.  If we marry this simple principle with contemporary (and free) digital technology, there are some tools I’m hoping to institute both in and out of the classroom for individual and collaborative projects for the upcoming term (stay tuned!). 

We all know that history demands specificity – Dipity encourages students to develop digital timelines with narrative, images, URLs, video, audio, text, social media, and so on.  This can be done individually or collaboratively – I’ve started one here and am asking students to contribute to the timeline with (meaningful and hopefully unique) events that lead up to the Civil War.

Since history also demands crafting a solid narrative, students could use Posterus as a mobile app or Prezi on any computer to combine all sorts of digital technology and share it immediately with those in a group/class.

These three sites are by no means very comprehensive – but they offer us pretty interesting opportunities to better engage the work of some really wonderful historical websites!