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Take note, history teachers. The National History Education Clearinghouse is about to make your lives a lot easier. There you can find reviews of history websites, strategies and best practices, lesson plans, plus professional development resources.

Like a lot of history sites, The Clearninghouse is big on using primary sources rather than just textbooks and lectures. One article,”The Power of Primary Sources: How Teaching American History Grants Changed My Classroom” talks about how primary sources…well, changed that teacher’s classroom and got students engaged. The site’s creators realize exploration and discovery are what makes history seem fun. Indiana Jones probably gave a lot of lectures as a teacher, but it’s the action sequences that the movies focus on. Learning by doing can get students to care and, dare I say, actually get excited about history class. -BILL FERRIS

National History Education Clearinghouse

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The world can be a dangerous place. Aside from the business in Iraq, there are problems in Darfur, Chechnya, and the Basques and Spaniards aren’t exactly friendly these days, either. If you teach history or social studies, you can show your students where the hot spots are with World Conflicts Today. Click on the site’s world map and find out the specifics on conflicts around the globe. Find out about key figures, the politics involved, and even get a quick overview with handy PowerPoint presentation.

World history is built on conflict. World Conflicts Today gives you the skinny on the big ones. Hopefully, by learning the issues behind these skirmishes, we can learn how to prevent them in the future. -BILL FERRIS

World Conflicts Today

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I saw the new Indiana Jones movie last weekend, so I’m suddenly keen on history and archeology. That’s what drew me to BBC Ancient History. This site provides a close-up look at several ancient civilizations, including the Mayan Empire, Mesopotamia, Rome, Greece, India, and several others.

BBC Ancient History packs the usual resources like images, time lines and scholarly articles, along with animated demonstrations of architecture, like an Iron Age Roundhouse from British prehistory. You can also find some surprisingly fun games. I recommend Viking Quest, which is like Oregon Trail, except instead of migrating to the west, you’re trying to loot a monastery in Britain. It’s not easy - for bringing home a paltry 150 pieces of silver and eight slaves, I was banished to a fishing village in Norway.

If you cover any of these civilizations during your world history course - and it’s hard to imagine world history without the Greeks or Egyptians - your students will want to check out BBC Ancient History for additional resources. They’ll get a lot more knowledge, and they won’t even have to bring a bullwhip or fedora. -BILL FERRIS

BBC Ancient History

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When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones and I dreamed about being on Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple. Sadly, I’m not currently exploring foreign lands for ancient artifacts and getting chased by Nazis, nor did I ever get the chance to be a Blue Barracuda. But with National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid, your students can have the opportunities that I never did, and learn while doing it!

With this fun and educational game, your students can coast through an ancient pyramid using a robot to search for hieroglyphic clues. Once they find the hieroglyphic in each room, they can access the secret room to see mummies and other neat stuff. It’s a great way to start a lesson on Egyptian history and to discuss the significance of pyramids and hieroglyphics.

And after your students get to scope out some mummies, they can move on to find shrunken treasure, explore Mars, or even learn about helping animals with other map games on the National Geographic’s My Wonderful World Web site.

These games are fun, engaging and most of all, educational. And if your aspirations were the same as mine growing up, you can live vicariously through your students! Everyone wins! -LAUREN FROHNE

Explore a Pyramid
My Wonderful World

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You’ve heard a lot about this “social networking” stuff kids are talking about. Whether you’re a complete networking newbie or you’ve got a MySpace, Facebook and Twitter account, make sure to check out iCue, a site from NBC News that combines peer connection with learning and multimedia.

iCue is an online learning environment that will let your students collaborate online while learning. While it does have fun stuff like games, iCue’s coolest features are the Cue Cards, which play video clips, as well as view images, documents, and video transcripts, related to the subject you’re looking up. Like an online baseball card, “flip” the Cue Card over to read useful info about the person speaking, his or her political views, the source of the video clip, earned run average, and lots more. Each card is tagged with notes and keywords, and if NBC’s notes don’t cut it, you can write in your own. Also like baseball cards, you can save and share them, so you can finally get hold of the Barack Obama rookie card.

Once they’re in iCue, students can build their friends network, interact with peers through discussion forums, and comment on others’ Cue Cards or ideas. iCue forums also have a “Thought Starter” which you can use to spark student discussion about an event in the news.

For its debut, iCue features content focused on politics, since there’s apparently a presidential election coming up. Over the summer they’ll add resources for courses including US History and English language and composition. Who knows? Once your students get started on iCue, discussing political candidates and collaborating on history research may just take precedence over updating their MySpace pages. -BILL FERRIS

iCue

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I recently had to create a time line for a project. Not knowing what else to do, I cobbled one together in Excel like a caveman. Literally three days later, I heard about Mnemograph, which would have made my time line look a lot better, and would have required a lot less effort.

Mnemograph makes creating a time line easy. Your time line can cover any duration, from a couple of hours to several hundred years (great for history projects). To add an entry, just add the date or time and the event description, and you’re all set. You can also import images to give your time line a more historic flair.

Mnemograph is kind of a one-trick pony, but that single trick is pretty valuable if you need to plan a project or illustrate some historical milestones. One milestone I’ve hit is that, thanks to Mnemograph, I won’t have to hack these things together in Excel anymore. -BILL FERRIS

Mnemograph

There’s an old saying among history teachers - those who ignore the lessons of history might have paid more attention if it was packaged like a major network crime drama*.

Now your students can become historical detectives and investigate cases like the Boston Massacre and The Case of Sam Smiley with HSI: Historical Scene Investigation, a site from the College of William & Mary School of Education.

Not since Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? have sleuthing and social studies worked together so harmoniously. Students are given primary sources (or “evidence” in the parlance of detective work) they can use to investigate these historical cases. HSI challenges students to become real historians as they examine sources and form theories about what happened in each case.

Apparently the term “historian” isn’t cool enough to excite kids about history, so dubbing them “detectives” is the proverbial sugar to help the medicine of historical inquiry go down. With the one-two punch of HSI and the new Indiana Jones movie this summer, studying the past may become kids’ career of choice. -BILL FERRIS

* not an actual saying

HSI: Historical Scene Investigation
CSI meets Social Studies: The Historical Scene Investigation Project (HSI) via NCS-Tech

The world keeps shrinking. Online technology makes learning about other areas and cultures feasible for everyone without the hassles of obtaining a passport and figuring out exchange rates. ProjectExplorer makes the process even easier by hosting several online excursions around the globe at one website.

ProjectExplorer is a collection of virtual field trips with video, pictures, and journal entries that chronicle the adventures abroad. The site currently features trips to South Africa and Shakespeare’s England (via historical sites rather than by time machine). Each trip has multiple tour guides for each grade level (one for elementary, one for middle, one for high school, etc.), so you can be sure your students will get the information most appropriate to them.

Traveling is a wonderful way to learn about history and culture in other parts of the world. It’s also a great way to max out a credit card and miss a lot of school, so it’s nice to know sites like ProjectExplorer won’t leave your kids behind. -BILL FERRIS

ProjectExplorer

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World War II was a dangerous time when pretzels attacked croissants and sushi attacked cheeseburgers. The Gulf War conflict saw chicken nuggets dropped on unsuspecting kebobs.

That’s not exactly what you’ll find in history books, but Stefan Nadelman’s brilliant five-and-a-half minute film Food Fight recreates our country’s military incursions and involvements since 1939 using food as its main characters. You’ll see egg rolls, French fries, bagels, and falafel engaged in combat and culinary violence that will no doubt provoke conversation about warfare and world affairs. Students may have trouble deciphering which foods represent which countries, but a handy cheat sheet fills you in on why the beef stroganoff keeps multiplying and how the kebobs represent different interests. The site also lists which battles are depicted.

Food Fight is an imaginative way to synthesize almost a century’s worth of aggression, and with a little more imagination, you could find a variety of ways to use the film in your classroom: discussion starter, model project, or sample for media analysis. Just be careful to keep your bag lunch out of sight—you might be drawn into additional combat. –ROSS WHITE

Food Fight

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Hark! Forsooth! Hie thee hence! These are just a few of the neat words and phrases your students can use in creating their own medieval epic, thanks to the Historic Tale Construction Kit.

Based on the Bayeux Tapestry which chronicled the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Kit allows students to create their own stories on a virtual tapestry. Students will get to type the story in their best Middle English. They can add “FOLC” like cooks and beggars, as well as “BEASTS” such as dogs, goats, even dragons.

This program is a great opportunity to talk about medieval history and the events depicted in the original tapestry. And it makes for a really fun storytelling activity.

The Gallery didn’t work when I tried the kit, so I wasn’t able to save my own epic tale. However, using the “Print Screen” button and then pasting the image into a graphics program (or even Microsoft Word) will let your kids record their tales for posterity. Hey, if you’re going to make a story look like it’s survived for a thousand years, you may as well do what you can to make it last. -BILL FERRIS

Historic Tale Construction Kit

It’s hard to believe sometimes that America’s Civil War was less than 200 years ago, and how far we have come since then. Perhaps one of the greatest aspects of this war was that it was well documented, perhaps one of the first wars to have so many forms of media available to capture it. The Valley Project has collected and electronically reproduced that media in an online archive that includes images, letters, maps, soldiers’ records, and official documents.

There is more content here than you might ever need, but when it comes to Civil War resources, this collection is tops. The site itself is easy to browse or search, so if there is something specific you might be looking for, you’re bound to find it here. Courtesy of University of Virginia’s Virginia Center for Digital History, so be sure your students cite them for any research they might do. Whether you’re a American History teacher or not, this site could be useful to help students understand first-hand what America experienced not so long ago. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

The Valley of the Shadow

According to the Census Bureau, the 300 millionth American was born sometime in October, 2006. A lot can change in the time it takes to generate that many folks, too. In fact, we have gained 100 million of those people in just a shade under 40 years. Factmonster brings us this list via the U.S. Census Bureau about just how much things have changed since our population has increased exponentially. Presented here are factoids for the milestone years, 1915 - 100 million, 1967 - 200 million, and 2006 - 300 million.

You’ll find data such as prices of new houses, price of milk per gallon, average household size (decreased), Tuberculosis death rate (decreased), and median age of the population (increased). These facts can be helpful if you are studying U.S. history, or any sort of social studies for that matter. Take a look here to get a reality check as to how much we’ve grown in less than a century. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo cred: rightee on Flickr)

300 Million Americans

The New Deal Network is the one stop shop for all your New Deal needs, folks. Teaching a lesson in your U.S. History class about FDR and his grand plan to turn the Great Depression topsy-turvy? The New Deal Network has the photographs you need to spice up your lectures. Wait - don’t stop there, friend - because NDN’s got historical documents up to its electronic ceiling.

All-night planning sessions got you down, teach? Let NDN’s lesson plans do the work for you. There’s Discovery Guides, Timelines, and don’t forget about the Additional Resources. Whatever information concerning the Great Depression and the New Deal you might be looking for, this place has it all. Its more fun than the Chicago World’s Fair and a Motion Picture rolled into one - enjoy all the informative information and New Deal resources the Inter-Net has to offer! - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

New Deal Network

The study of history depends upon primary sources. So of course, we give our students textbooks instead. If you’d like to inject a little more immediacy into your history lesson, take a look at EyeWitness to History, a site that puts students in touch with the past by viewing it, as the site proclaims, “through the eyes of those who lived it.”

EyeWitness to History is true to its name - articles consist of first-hand accounts of historical events. Land speculator William Cooper (after whom Cooperstown, New York is named) tells his version of the early days of the United States. You can also hear the famous radio broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster. Oh, the humanity!

There are lots of other areas of the site you should check out, such as the Photo of the Week, as well as History in Motion, which shows film clips from the past. EyeWitness to History will help your students understand history better by putting them right in the thick of it. -BILL FERRIS

EyeWitness to History

Teaching history gets easier when you find a topic your students can relate to. Themselves, for example. Your students can see the historic moments of the day they were born at Kakorama.

The facts your students find can be great jumping-off points for further discussion. I learned I share a birthday with a Roman emperor, a pope, and the guy who invented photography. Right there you could talk about Roman history, the influence the Catholic Church had in Europe, as well as the science behind taking photos.

Giving history a personal touch could make the difference between kids who enjoy learning about the past, and getting peppered with a dozen versions of, “When am I ever going to need to know this?” -BILL FERRIS

Kakorama