Here's a fun activity featured by Richard Byrne dealing with the Civil War. Who Am I?: A History Mystery is a mystery-solving activity (great for the SMART Board) from the Smithsonian. Basically you are given a section of a photograph of an important historical individual during the Civil War for you to guess who they are. You are, also, given a clue and five artifacts, two of them which are associated with the mystery history figure. Each of the artifacts have historical information when you click on them.
There appears to be only six individuals - Willie Johnston (Union Drummer Boy), Lewis Douglass (US Colored Troops of America), Dorothea Dix (Union Nurse), John Simpson Crocker (Union Colonel), Bell Boyd (Confederate Spy), Stand Waite (Cherokee Confederate General).Classroom Connection: Could be a fun, alternative, SMART Board activity. It is, however, limiting with only six historical individuals; especially if none of these figures are discussed in the lessons.
A great tool that can be used on ever MLTI Macbook.When on a web page that you would like to enlarge the text (i.e. new article or selection of text), go to your browsers top menu bar and click View > Zoom. Make sure Zoom Text Only is checked. When you are ready, you can either go back to View > Zoom and click Zoom In, or key stroke Command+ (plus). When you want to zoom out, Command- (minus).
Readability.com is a powerful tool that pulls online news articles and cleans them up. In other words, gets rid of any other content on that web page - i.e. advertisements, other headlines, comment posts, or links - and displays a "clean" article with any images that pertain to it. Readability.com, also, allows you to print, share on social networks, and customize appearance. You, now, have the ability to save your chosen articles as PDF, add annotations for your students; or have your students add annotations. The document below covers more detail.
This Add-on tool will be embedded right into your Firefox browser for easy use. No Admin needed.
The document is very easy to read and user-friendly. I have the web link in the document, however simply go to readability.com
