Posted by: Mary Alice Anderson on: February 12, 2012
Not the trail that Lewis and Clark traveled, but the memorable computer game. Ask a group of adults about their first memories of computers; often they mention Oregon Trail. Some recall the original Apple II green and black version; others a CD-ROM (WOW) or networked version. My current online students brought up Oregon Trail in [...]
Posted by: Mary Alice Anderson on: December 28, 2011
Help! I am a teacher and would like my students to look in newspapers for what happened on their birthday. Does anyone know where we can go so they can actually see the newspaper, like microfiche? Contemporary newspaper archives and digitized copies of newspapers published before the Internet make the popular “Today in History” or “What [...]
Posted by: Mary Alice Anderson on: December 19, 2011
This class changed my teaching forever. It was powerful! Congratulations to science teacher Stacey Balbach who will be speaking about Primary Sources Science at the National Science Teachers Convention in March 2012. Way to go! When she was a student in Teaching With Primary Sources, a Wisconsin science teacher discovered primary sources are not just [...]
Posted by: Mary Alice Anderson on: August 29, 2011
Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! Musicians from Wisconsin’s First Brigade Band brought 150 year-old Civil War brass instruments, a drum, stories, and songs to the Winona County History Center and made the Civil War come alive at an August program. We heard the sounds and stories of brass instruments representing over 200 in a collection at a [...]
Posted by: Mary Alice Anderson on: August 26, 2011
“2/3 of teachers believe digital resources help them differentiate learning for individual students.” Teachers also like short video segments and believe videos stimulate discussion video comment stimulate discussion. <Eschool News March 2011 > The Library of Congress American Memory Collections have videos ranging from the Coca Cola Advertising Collection to Early Edison films and Presidents. Did [...]
Posted by: Mary Alice Anderson on: April 13, 2011
The sesquicentennial of the Civil War and today’s news media stories about Fort Sumter have left my head spinning. There are an abundance of primary source Civil War documents, photographs, maps, political cartoons, and ephemera readily available to us in digital format. But how do we find it? Digitalization makes these resources come alive [...]
Posted by: Mary Alice Anderson on: January 18, 2011
Learning from the students always adds to the pleasure of online teaching. Yesterday a student in a class I’m teaching for the Library Media Education Department at Minnesota State University-Mankato introduced us to Tagexdo. It took just seconds to create the star cloud by submitting the URL for this blog. I explored color, font, [...]
Posted by: Mary Alice Anderson on: November 8, 2009
A photo of middle school age students wearing headphones, viewing action on a small screen and looking like they are having fun was haunting me. I had to find it. I did! I also found a photo of four students sitting at a media center table working with books and notebooks; in the background are [...]
