Congratulations to Jennifer Orr, 1st-grade teacher at Annandale Terrace Elementary, Annandale, VA, and writer and Teacher Representative for Teachinghistory.org! On Sunday, June 24, she received the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)'s Kay L. Bitter Vision Award for Excellence in Technology-Based PreK–2 Education. The award recognizes a PreK–2 educator whose work has had "a significant positive impact on technology use in education."

Orr, a National Board Certified Teacher, came to teaching early elementary after teaching fourth and fifth grades. Passionate about using technology in the classroom, Orr met the challenge of finding innovative ways to use digital tools with her new, younger, often preliterate students. While upper elementary students could jump into blogging, creating Wikis, and using other tools that require strong reading and writing skills, first-graders needed a different approach.

". . . the most critical thing for me as a teacher is connections," says Orr. "Technology offers my students connections that I could never provide them. They can connect with learners around the world, with content about anything, and with experts in any field." Orr finds ways for her first-graders to make these connections using tools like VoiceThread, Wallwisher and PrimaryWall, pocket camcorders, digital cameras, an interactive whiteboard, and video creation programs. She blogs about her experiences at her blog, Elementary, My Dear, or Far From It, and here at Teachinghistory.org. You can watch her in the classroom and in DC with her students in Beyond the Chalkboard.

Orr appreciates that ISTE offers an award recognizing the challenges of bringing technology into the early elementary classroom. "Previous winners are women I immensely respect, many of whom have served as mentors to me as I transitioned to teaching primary," says Orr. "I feel so honored to join them in this."

You don't have to look far to see how important music is to modern American life. Young people (as well as adults) talk about music, listen to music, download music, remix music, share music, and define themselves by music. In classrooms across the country, MP3 players and pop-tune ringtones give students' musical tastes away (and get them in trouble). But has music always been this personal, portable, and repeatable?

Ask your students to think back. Do they remember a time when music wasn't something you could own? When they, someone in their family, or someone they knew didn't have an MP3 player—or a CD, tape, or record player?

Before the birth of the recording industry, you could buy sheet music and learn how to perform musical pieces for yourself—but that was it. An individual performance was ephemeral, literally once in a lifetime.

When the recording industry took off, music became an object. Now you could buy and trade moments in musical time, preserved forever. You could listen to artists who lived far away from you, whom you might never see live. You could listen to your favorite performances again and again. You could even sell music, without having to worry about arranging performances. One song sung once by one artist could earn money for months or years to come. Sound become solid, something that could be passed from hand to hand—and preserved.

On May 10, 2011, the Library of Congress launched its National Jukebox, an online archive of more than 10,000 recordings from 1901–1925. According to the website, Library of Congress staff worked throughout 2010 to digitize this massive collection of Victor Talking Machine Company recordings (Victor, now RCA, is one of the oldest record companies in existence, according to the Library of Congress's blog entry announcing the launch of the Jukebox).

You can browse the recordings by vocal artist, composer, lyricist, language, place or date of recording, target audience, label, category, or genre. And if you find some music you'd like to remember? Add it to your playlist in the site's pop-up player. Now you can listen to it while you browse other sites, email it to yourself to listen to later, or share it with others on social media sites or by embedding it in a blog or website.

While exploring the Jukebox is entertaining in its own right—I just spent two minutes listening to humorous singer Burt Shepard trying to lure a lost cat home—it also makes invaluable primary sources easily accessible.

Teaching about the rise of ragtime and jazz? Make a playlist of famous (and less famous) songs and artists and share it with your students.

How about the invention of the airplane? The Haydn Quartet's "Up in My Aeroplane" can give students an idea of the romance and novelty of flight six years after the Wright Brothers' first successful test run.

World War I? "Hooray, the war is over!" sings Harry Lauder in 1918; months earlier, baritone Reinald Werrenrath remembered the U.S.'s debt to Lafayette and to embattled France.

Pick a time period, a genre, an artist, a word—and go looking! There's something in this storehouse to accompany almost any topic from 1901–1925, if you look hard enough. Use the recordings to grab your students' attention—or ask them to analyze or compare music and lyrics. What do the words (if you choose a vocal piece) say? What emotions does the piece seem to seek to evoke? When was it recorded? Where? Who audience did the composer, artist, or publisher have in mind?

Finding music by topic can be difficult, as none of the pieces have transcriptions, but a little creative searching should leave you with at least a handful of catchy new sources to play with. Watch for more to come—the Library of Congress adds new content monthly, and it hopes to provide content from other Sony labels, such as Columbia and Okeh, in the future.

Every September 17, Constitution Day calls on teachers to memorialize—and critically engage with—Constitutional history in the classroom. But what approach to the Constitution should you take? What quality teaching resources are available? How can you interest your students in a document that is more than 200 years old?

In 2008, Teachinghistory.org published a roundup of Constitution Day resources. Many of those resources remain available, but online Constitution Day content continues to grow. Check out the sites below for materials that recount the Constitutional Convention of 1787, compare the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, explore U.S. Supreme Court cases that have interpreted the Constitution, and apply the Constitution to contemporary debates.

The Library of Congress's Constitution Day page collects the full text of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Amendments, as well as the Federalist Papers and the Articles of Confederation. Lesson plans for grades 6–12 accompany the documents. The page also includes short suggested reading lists for elementary, middle, and high school, and links to relevant Library of Congress American Memory collections, such as Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and the papers of James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Also check out the Library's collection of primary sources "Creating the United States."

You can find an elegant, simple presentation of the Constitution on the National Archives' Constitution Day page. Check out their high-resolution PDF of the original document, part of NARA's 100 Milestone Documents exhibit.

If the Constitution is proving a difficult read for your students, try the National Constitution Center's Interactive Constitution. Search the text by keyword or topic, and click on passages that are unclear to find explanatory notes from Linda R. Monk's The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution. The Constitution Center also offers its own Constitution Day page, with a short video on the creation of the Constitution, interactive activities, and quizzes.

If you're not already familiar with EDSITEment, created by the National Endowment for the Humanities, take a look through their extensive collection of lesson plans. A quick search reveals more than 90 lessons related to the Constitution.

Interested in bringing home to students the Constitution's importance today? The New York Times' Constitution Day page links current events to the Constitution in more than 40 lesson plans. The Times also invites students to submit answers to questions such as "Should School Newspapers Be Subject to Prior Review?" and "What Cause Would You Rally Others to Support?"

Can't find anything here that sparks your interest or suits your classroom? Many more organizations and websites offer Constitution Day resources, including the Bill of Rights Institute, the American Historical Association, Annenberg Media, and Consource. (Check out our Lesson Plan Reviews for a review of a lesson plan from Consource on the Preamble to the Constitution.)

History teachers have long asked students to create timelines to help conceptualize and understand historical events. Student-created timelines were often limited by the space they occupied. Often teachers would have students focus on a few events and ask them to write very small on their notebook paper to squeeze in events. Clever teachers invested in rolls of butcher paper or banner paper to have students create long timelines. But thanks to today's web designers, timelines are no longer limited in space. Using free timeline builders online allows students to see concepts over time without the constraints of paper and a straightedge.

I have always liked using timelines in my classroom to help students see change over time and help students remember chronology (an oft-heard complaint for students of history).

My students have made standard social, political, and economic timelines of eras of U.S. history in preparation for exams. My students have also created the popular timeline of events leading up the Civil War. I thought myself a clever teacher using large rolls of butcher paper for these timelines to maximize the number of events included and student participation. It was not until I sat down to read the new National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies put out by the National Council for the Social Studies that I saw another way for students to create timelines. "Learners demonstrate understanding by using graphic software to create a timeline depicting a scientific idea of the evolution of a technological innovation, and predicting how that idea or technology might develop in the next 10–20 years." (NCSS 57) With this, I began my search for digital timeline-building websites.

A quick search revealed lots of possibilities for creating timelines online for free. I had to spend a little time playing with each one to find the site that would best work for my needs and students. There are sites that are better tailored to elementary students. There are also those that are more powerful, but less user-friendly. This site provides a nice review of the various digital timeline sites available for free. My project required students to create events with years BCE and CE, which limited the sites I could use and may be a consideration in your site choice. You may also wish to consider what types of multimedia features you would like students to be able to embed in their timelines. Some sites offer the ability to embed pictures and videos. Most timeline-building sites allow users to embed their timelines in blogs or other websites, making sharing timelines easy.

Adapting the product recommended by NCSS, I asked students to create a timeline showing the impact of the Scientific Revolution on a specific field of modern science. To go one step further, students were to make some predictions about future developments in that field (i.e. chemistry, geology, meteorology, etc.). My students quickly caught on to the user interface for the timeline builder and in three 45-minute class periods had researched and created a timeline specific to their field of modern science. You can see an example of one student's timeline here. With more time and practice, I believe that my students will become better at creating richer timelines. After they had created their timelines, students were able to view each others' and comment on them. Ultimately, we created a class timeline merging events from each student's timeline to see the broader impact of the Scientific Revolution.

Digital timelines allow teachers greater flexibility and creativity in assigning timeline activities to students over the old paper timelines. They also allow students to collaborate in a way that fosters chronological thinking and in-depth analysis of eras in history. I hope that you will experiment with digital timelines and share the creative ways you use them in your classroom.

The best way to use video in teaching history is short student-created segments for direct instruction. This post discusses what a group of teachers at the Education Study Group found works best for at-risk populations.

At my school, the figures are dismal: On the first day of school, you look at 23 students. Seventeen didn't eat breakfast at home, 16 struggle with English, five are designated Special Needs. On the last day of school, you still have 23, but nine of the faces changed without warning at some time during the year, due to high student mobility.

I'm not making excuses. To not acknowledge these hard facts would be educational malfeasance. It's where you start—with the student. Untangling these elementary students and teaching them to be lifelong learners of history is the goal, all the while striving to ensure they get what they need to pass NCLB requirements. In this environment, the correct use of video can be a lifesaver. In general, a large percentage of at-risk kids learn visually, in short bursts which can be repeated, at will. The Internet and digital video have made this a wonderful option.

When a short (two- to five-minute) video is played in class, we (the Education Study Group) recorded the highest student attention. Use a clip six to eight times in one lesson, and one gets the same attention numbers. This works with video clips from “expert” sources such as Discovery Education and some YouTube and TeacherTube videos, but the attention is heightened if the videos are created by students.

Our research found this is the best time to provide direct instruction. After the facts have been downloaded into your students' brains in this manner, then the discussion, examples, and inferences can be accomplished more easily.

If the same videos are put online where they can be accessed by the students, those who need to review can repeat the videos over and over. When the direct instruction video is played it triggers the ancillary information provided in class. Conversely, if the videos are of ancillary information and the direct instruction was provided via lecture, less is recalled by review of the videos.

Knowing the critical information is in the videos and online allows students to watch and interact in class, rather than take notes—an important element for success in at-risk populations.

Having students construct their own learning of history by building a video is great stuff, but many teachers do it backwards. They teach their regular lesson (lots of words, worksheets, and note taking) and then do something with technology as a "synthesizing" activity. That's not where technology goes. The research of Sugata Mitra and his "Hole in the Wall" experiment showed us that students should work in teams when using technology. In his experiment he placed computers throughout different remote regions of India and children were able to teach themselves to use the equipment, in small groups, without any external instruction. It is the research on which the global “one laptop per child” initiative is based.

In our research, we’ve taken that model and applied it using authentic publishing. We define "authentic publishing" simply by the fact that, once content is published, it can be Googled. There is a palpable difference in a student’s incentives when what they publish can be seen by a massive audience outside their classroom. When publishing information about U.S. history, for a project on the American Revolution for example, students (even very young students) get the added responsibility that people in the United Kingdom will actually be able to read what they write. They take care not to offend their audience. They understand they will be judged against everything out on the Internet, not just against their classmates' or teacher’s expectations. It energizes their writing, and spurs broader research.

Most important, it is completely self-initiated. Students review one another’s work without being directed to do so. They comment on one another’s work using the available tools (almost all online technologies have a comments feature). They learn from one another, and in the process of creation of the project, take those lessons and adapt and apply them to their own work. This collaborative learning is done, for the most part, without it being assigned, or even encouraged (though we do suggest teachers encourage this behavior).

We've done research over the past three years on how students use media at home. We find if they make it and publish it authentically, they review it repeatedly in production, and then at home with friends and family. We've found students watch their own media 25 or 50 times. And they repeatedly watch the media produced by other students in the class.

In one example, students were given a page to complete in a subject-specific wiki. They were shown the tools and allowed to use whichever media they wished. They worked in teams to accomplish their goals, even though they each had a separate page. The assignment was classical, with a standard rubric that could be used for any writing assignment. Teachers didn’t need to change the assignment parameters from what they would have assigned for a paper and pencil version. It was the medium which changed the paradigm.

What was most telling was students' activity at home. To a student, they would go home and review their page. They would show it to their brothers, their sisters, their friends, and parents. They would then look at the pages of each of the other students in their class. Then they would come in the next day and say something to the effect of, "I've got some new ideas on how to make my page better. Are we going to work on the wiki today?"

This example was a second-grade class with predominately special needs. Imagine the same activity, with worksheets. "A student goes home and reviews their worksheet, shows it to their siblings, friends, and parents. Then reviews the worksheet for everyone else in their class." It would never happen.

On the first day of spring break, it rained. Two students published videos on their pages that day. It's the power of publishing—authentic (Google-able) publishing—which provides the incentive, the power to this learning engine.

Our research illustrates students should construct their own visual media, developing parts of the direct instruction for the lesson. If they publish it authentically, they are motivated to excel due to a larger audience of peers and through competition with classmates. And they voluntarily review the material repeatedly.

As a primary school teacher my focus is on building basic academic skills in ways that are developmentally appropriate for my students. That means we focus most of our time on reading, writing, and math while ensuring that we have chances to play and explore our world.

As one can imagine, this leaves little time for social studies and science. I have standards and objectives to teach in these areas, but they are prioritized below the others. As a result, I look for ways to integrate them into other parts of our day.

Some ways to do so are obvious. When we are working on nonfiction reading skills I carefully choose books about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, or life in the past. As we explore writing reports I will gently nudge my students towards something about the past that has caught their interest. I stock my classroom library with biographies, history trade books, and historical fiction at appropriate reading levels. I choose read alouds that offer a window into the past, such as Potato: A Tale from the Great Depression by Kate Lied, Train to Somewhere by Eve Bunting, or books from the American Girl or Magic Tree House series.

In addition to those options, I also try to integrate our exploration of history into other areas. One way I do so is to have my students talk to family members and adults in the school about their own histories. Homework might be to ask someone in the family how their experience in school was different from that of my students or what going to the movies was like when they were young. During our morning meeting the next day we’ll talk about what their family members shared with them.

We study data and graphing in math in first grade and I use this as a chance to learn about the past. My students will fan out around the school and interview teachers, administrators, secretaries, lunch room helpers, and custodians about their lives in first grade. They might ask how many channels they had on TV then, did they wear seat belts or ride in car seats, how many telephones were in their house, etc. (I do try to send my students off to interview only those staff members old enough to make a difference here. Our just-out-of-college teachers won’t offer answers different enough to be noticeable.) Then we graph the answers they got from staff members and my students’ answers and look at the differences.

History is fascinating to young children, but it is also very nebulous. They struggle to understand something they can’t see. I try to build it into our days throughout the year to ensure that we are talking about and exploring history as much as possible. I want to correct misperceptions, expose them to surprising ideas, and generally encourage an interest in understanding how our world has changed over time.