This school year, each of my classes chose a person to represent them and become their class name. Instead of having blocks 3 and 4 or periods 6 and 7, I've had my Alice Paul and Daisy Bates classes on A Day and Dorie Miller and Rosie the Riveter on B Day.

At the beginning of the year, I gave my students the task of reading a biography in small groups. I chose historical figures in U.S. history, some well known and others lesser known to them, and created biographies no longer than a page, by cutting and pasting from credible websites or by using biographies from History Makers (published by Rada Press). After each group read their biography, they summarized what their person did and why they are in the history books. They then presented their findings to the class, as well as what characteristics their person possessed that would make them a great name to adopt for the class. Students cited such qualities as perseverance, tenacity, and strength. After the class heard all of the biographies, they voted on which name they wanted to adopt.

During the course of the year, I made sure each class had an activity outside of the curriculum that connected with their class name. Alice Paul, named after one of the founders of the National Women's Party, had a museum educator from the Sewall-Belmont House come in and speak about Paul. We then walked to the house and saw just how close the National Women's Party headquarters are to our school! Dorie Miller, who had taken the name of the first African American to receive the Navy Cross, had a museum educator from the National Portrait Gallery come to our class to share World War II posters, with an emphasis on the Dorie Miller poster. She created a lesson that had students then write their own historic labels, like you would find in a museum, for the poster. Rosie the Riveter visited the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War" exhibit and had a tour, emphasizing Rosie! The kids even practiced riveting! Daisy Bates, who had taken the name of the civil rights activist, traveled to the National Museum of American History in February and heard from veteran Freedom Riders. While there wasn't a direct connection to Daisy, they heard from civil rights leaders who fought alongside of Daisy Bates.

I've decided that I will definitely continue this for next year’s classes, but that I could never have another Dorie, Daisy, Alice, or Rosie class. So, my last assignment for each class this year was for them to create glogs memorializing their class names. Students worked individually or in pairs to create a glog.

The class then voted on which glog was the best. I will print the final, winning glog for each class in poster form and hang it in my room to teach future classes with and to remind me of the legacy of these classes.

But what's a glog? This is a question that my students had.

At first, they thought I said they were creating a blog—like a blog entry—since they were used to doing that. I clarified and enunciated the word "glog" again. There were confused looks.

A glog, as I explained to my students, is a multimedia poster, created on the computer. On a glog you can add text, photos, videos, music, audio recordings, documents—you name it!

One of the first things we did was find a Plan B. Glogster, a glog creation tool and community, is blocked by my school district. Having explored Glogster at home, I did know that they have a teacher's address. I directed my students to edu.glogster.com and had them create accounts as "Basic" members (it's free!). The students were soon underway!

Students were to create posters about their class name, and incorporate photos, a quote about or from their person, a brief summary of what their person did, and at least one multimedia clip (a video or music).

When the students were done with their posters, they published them and then emailed me their blog with the "email friends" feature. I did this activity over two days. The second day, I was much more clear about my expectations for inclusion of elements on the glog, and they turned out much better, content-wise, for more groups. I think it was helpful for students to have to think about the various elements to incorporate and served as a review of primary sources for them.

I can definitely say that this was a hit among the students. They really enjoyed learning about the new technology and many said they were going to go home and play with it. They became engrossed in looking for sources that others wouldn’t find so that their posters would be unique.

The technology was very intuitive for the students, and I learned a lot from watching them. While I had spent time learning how to glog myself, I watched my students just fly with it! Before I knew it, they were asking each other questions about how to add something or asking their friends to look at what they did on their screens. They clearly were enthusiastic for not only their class name, but for creatively sharing the history of their person through their glogs for future classes.

Evelyn MacPherson, one member of the two-person winning Alice Paul glog team, said the following about making her glog:

I enjoyed making the poster, it was a lot of fun to create something that could be used as a learning tool that required you to use creativity. We knew that you had to balance out the facts with things that would draw people to your poster, such as a theme, or pictures. It required some trial and error, but it was a lot of fun.

I really enjoyed this activity and hope to use glogs more in the future. Glogster was easy to use, and this activity required critical thinking skills from my students and integrated technology and history in an engaging way for them . . . and me!

Lists of Top Ten Best Sites For... or 100 Best Whatevers or One Thousand Resources to Help You... abound on the internet.

But are lists of Bests valuable? They are one way to corral the quick fix, hyperlinked capability of internet research and to mediate enormous quantities of material of unknown quality. Then there's always the hope that other people's time spent compiling these lists might save us some of our own.

So, here's an eclectic selection of a few lists that have come to our attention. Since we don't want to marginalize other prime candidates, we won't call them the best of the bests, but they're definitely quite, quite good. And if all of them don't directly address history teaching, many do speak to pedagogical methods applicable to the history curriculum.

Educator Larry Ferlazzo is a prolific list creator (also featured in previous Clearinghouse blog posts). My Best Of Series is a table of contents to those lists that cover topics from A to W (Art to Web 2.0) with social studies, ESL and ELL, and a broad variety of content and methodological topics in between.

Making Teachers Nerdy is another teacher-based blog from a tech integration specialist who went back into the classroom when budget cuts affected technology teaching. This Kansas teacher blogged between January and September in 2009, annotating links and best of lists of tech tools appropriate to her curriculum. Attached comments from readers augment her blog entries.

Top Ten Sites for Brainstorming/Mind Mapping is from Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero the blog of technology education specialist Dav Kapuler. Kapular advocates mind mapping as "a tool that facilitates ideas and collaborative in nature," as an ideal tool for 21st century learners.

In October, 2009, the New York Times published The 10 best educational websites. Maybe yes. Maybe no. But these selections definitely link to some of the largest educational organizations that are crammed with information helpful to the American history curriculum and that serve as gateways to relevant microsites.

History News Network features Cliopatria's History Blogroll. This gateway places blogs within 30 categories such as American History, Primary Sources, Military History, Women's History—and each listing is well-populated with history content and commentary.

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators lists American History Sites, General History and Social Studies Sites, World and Ancient History Sites. These, too, are eclectic lists that may take you to historic sites, archives, lesson plans, and tech tools.

Ten Tips for Personalized Learning via Technology from Edutopia talks about how to use digital technology tools for teaching and assessment to help meet the challenge of increased classroom diversity. "Income levels, ethnicities, family structures, first languages, interests, and abilities now vary so much, that a traditional teaching approach, with a uniform lesson targeted to the average-level student, just doesn't cut it" is the premise of the list.

Resources specifically directed toward middle school teachers and students are often difficult to find, so here's a list of one.

Middle School Matrix: Exploring the changing world of middle school teaching and technology is a blog from a Philadelphia history, English, and technology educator . She talks about what she teaches, how she implements lesson plans, about how technology works (or doesn't work) with different units, and about the role and goals of the educator. The focus is the curriculum and the student; technology is a means to meet classroom goals.

One may hear a thousand words or read a thousand volumes, and, at the end of the process, be very much where [he or she] was as regards knowledge. Something more than merely admitting it into the mind is necessary, if it is to remain there. It must not be passively received but actively and actually entered into, embraced, mastered. The mind must go to meet what comes to it from without.—John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

History instruction cries out for engaging thoughtful strategies to help our students embrace the content. And although it is understood by most teachers that information must not be passively received, it takes thought and a repertoire of effective strategies to maintain activity and engagement while imparting information. John Henry Newman discussed the ineffectiveness of imparting information through lectures and reading without engagement. DVDs, videos, and online streaming, via such online educational services as Discovery Education's United Streaming, were far off in the future when he wrote, but the same idea holds true. When showing students a video, DVD, or online streaming video to convey information on a unit, can we still actively engage our students? Can we still help them to embrace the content?

As history teachers, we want our students to question and to inquire into historical events, ideas, and people, and we also want to impart historical information. One way to do both is through the use of DVDs, videos, and streaming, and we have many excellent video sources that we can choose from, but there are problems that teachers face in using them. How can we help our students get the information from that form of media while still keeping them involved? How do we help our students mine the media for information while still having them watch the program? How we utilize video resources determines much of what our students learn from them.

Some will give students worksheets to fill out while viewing, but that is hardly involving them. Having them take notes while viewing might get students active but while they are writing they are distracted from the viewing and invariably will miss some of the presentation. Some years back, I came across a reading strategy that utilized the old Cornell notetaking strategy and I adapted it for use with video presentations. My students know it simply as the Interactive Viewing Guide and it has become my go-to strategy in using nonfiction videos and DVDs.

Experience told me long ago that simply turning on the video and running it from start to finish was definitely not the way to go, and so I began early in my career dividing the video viewing into segments. Using the viewing guide allows students to question, take brief notes, discuss, elaborate, and summarize what they have watched. The guide has several steps: 1) Preview the video or DVD, 2) Develop questions as a class, 3) Ask students to jot down one- or two-word impressions regarding each question while they view, 4) Divide students up for pair or group discussion, 5) Prompt students to summarize, 6) Convene whole-class discussion.

Key points for use of the guide include what the guide looks like, questioning, student notetaking while viewing the video, and discussion. I put the following guide on my Smartboard and students copy it into their notebooks:

My preference is to begin the preview with discussion and developing questions. I might use an inquiry or simply pose questions to my students about the subject matter. I might use a primary source or artifact, but it is important to begin by appealing to the students' curiosity and establishing a purpose for what will be viewed. From this, we will begin to develop questions that they are to keep in mind during the video segment. As a teacher I guide the questioning and from their ideas develop a few brief questions for which they are to watch (of course, as a teacher I steer the questioning as I know what I want them to learn from the presentation).

Keeping the number of questions that students are to watch for during the segment to two or three, the questions are written in the Watch for. . . section. Students are told that when they hear or see something in the DVD that relates to the questions they are watching for, they are to jot down a one- or two-word impression or idea. This is the most difficult thing for many students as they want to write down everything, but they are told to keep it short; their purpose is not to write lengthy notes but to jot down short memory joggers for discussion.

Following the segment, we use a quick summarizing technique I call One-Minute Review for groups of four. Each student has jotted down some impressions and the brief review time allows them to discuss the ideas that they jotted down during the segment they just viewed. In this strategy, I set an interval timer on the Smartboard to run for four 15-second intervals. At the end of each interval an alarm sounds. Each student in each group reviews the impressions they wrote down for 15 seconds, the alarm sounds and the next student reviews hers or his, then the next, etc.

Following the brief discussion each students writes their own summary in the appropriate section of the guide. The summaries must be clear and complete and answer the questions posed for the DVD segment. We complete the interactive viewing guide with a whole-class discussion, following the reading of a number of summaries.

The Interactive Viewing Guide has become my go-to strategy when using DVD segments in my 7th-grade history class. I find it excellent for use with nonfiction videos/DVDs/streaming (although I often use the one-minute review strategy from time to time with fictional programs, I do not use the writing component of this strategy until after the program). Although I continue to tweak it, I have found that through its use students become actively engaged in thinking about, discussing, and writing about information. Give it a try, adapt it, and help your students to embrace the informational content of the DVDs/videos that you use in class.

Often, in my mission to include primary sources in my AP U.S. history curriculum, I find that my lessons become predictable and less awe-inspiring than I would like them to be. My students have analyzed, discussed, interpreted, and synthesized primary resources to such an extent that some of them lose sight of the fact that these items can be a lot of fun to manipulate. If your students sometimes feel the same way, why not try something a little different that still includes sound instructional techniques and content synthesis? Here is what my students and I did to fight primary-source boredom.

After reading the chapters and completing some basic homework related to the Depression, I asked my student to find at least three separate primary sources pertaining to the Great Depression. The first needed to be an official document of some sort (government document, newspaper article, legislation, etc.); the second could be an image (cartoon, poster, photo, etc.); and the third item needed to be a personal account of some sort (diary, letter, editorial, etc.). Each of these items needed to be from the Depression period, between 1929-1938.

Once my students found their documents, I asked them to create a story that bound the three documents together. This could be total fiction or some version of historical fiction, but the story needed to not only mention each document, but explain or address its historical meaning and significance within the structure of the story. Other than these instructions, I allowed the students to apply their own creative instincts to the assignment. (Note: Previously, we had done a number of other primary source projects that required the kids to find sources on their own, so this was not the first time I'd asked them to locate content-specific primary sources. If this is your student's first exposure to primary source research, you may want to spend some extra time guiding them through Teachinghistory.org or another quality history resource venue).

Upon receiving this newfangled assignment, some of my logical-sequential students moaned at its right-brained nature, but a handful of kids saw it as a chance to set themselves apart from the traditional super-student who can read fast, ace every test, and answer every discussion question first. In addition, a bunch of kids were simply relieved by the break in routine. With such a diverse reaction to the assignment, I was excited to see how this experiment would go.

The final products offered a fantastic diversity of effort, creativity, and depth of research. As always, there were a few students who just went through the motions and turned in three documents with a superficial, ill-formed story, but most of the students seemed to enjoy the departure from strict, conventional historical study. Passionate accounts of suffering, hardship, sadness, anger, hope, and overcoming obstacles arose from the images and documents they discovered. Fictional characters were created based upon contextual clues offered by the source material and plotlines evolved as my students made artistic and historical connections between each of the documents. It was fascinating to see how easy it was for my students to synthesize the information in their documents and carry it into their imagined realities.

Overall, I loved the results of the assignment. The stories were fun to read, and since we seldom have a chance to travel creative avenues in the A.P. curriculum, I think most of the kids viewed it as a welcomed break from the relentless push towards the exam in May. But what seemed like a break to them was simply another one of Mr. Gorr's hidden agendas—one of which was so hidden that I didn't even see it until I was grading their assignments. Here are my original objectives, plus the third I discovered:

The first objective of this assignment was to provide curricular diversity and a chance for my right-brainers to excel. I think we accomplished that successfully.

The second objective and my original reason for designing the lesson was to obscure the anxiety-invoking document analysis component of Document Based Question (DBQ) writing by allowing students to create their own story instead of basing everything upon documented history. This lesson still required them to evaluate and synthesize their sources, but they could do so without the restrictions they felt when confronted with DBQs. Evaluation and synthesis skills are essential to writing a good DBQ, and this assessment allowed us to look at these processes in a totally different way.

Once I related the correlations between the fictional DBQ and the actual DBQ, a number of my students seemed to have an epiphany. This assignment allowed them to see document analysis in a much more simplistic way.

I discovered the third objective retroactively. After reading their stories, I noticed that some students chose documents with a story already in mind. In other words, they didn't write a story to connect their documents, they chose documents to fit their story. At first, I just saw this as a shortcut to finishing the project, but the more I thought about it, the more it emphasized the challenges that face historians when they try to relate the past to modern audiences. If historians conduct their research with a preconceived idea of what the documents will say, they can inadvertently ignore important information that could challenge the history they want to tell. In some cases, the omissions could dramatically skew the conclusions made and diminish the creditability of the author and his/her historiography.

In many ways, this objective overtook my original objectives. Since our understanding of the past is in the hands of historians (both good and bad), I think it is very important for my students to understand the interpretation that goes into writing history. We compared Christopher Browning's book Ordinary Men with Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners. Each author wrote significantly different histories about a group of German soldiers, based upon the identical primary resources. My students were enthralled by the discussion of how important a historian's job is. For a few minutes, I was cool!

In all, I was extremely pleased with all aspects of this assignment. It allowed us to verge from the beaten path and explore underused methodologies that allowed my students to expand their critical and creative thinking skills while still maintaining focus upon the core objectives of the AP curriculum.

If you have suggestions, comments, questions, etc., please let me know. More importantly, if something I have written motivates you to create something even better, please share it with me. We are all curricular thieves in teaching and in this case, my hope is that I can, as Huey Long put it, "Share the Wealth."