Blogging to Teach History

I have to admit that at the beginning of this year I was struggling to come up with more meaningful homework for my 11th grade US II students. I found myself underwhelmed at the thought of end of textbook section questions yet I wanted a forum that would offer a level of consistency. It was for these reasons that, well into the school year, I started my blog: http://www.historywithmrscarney.wordpress.com/. It has offered everything I was looking for and more in terms of having a consistent, flexible, differentiated, and meaningful homework. I believe this will only be more successful when I start the next school year with this tool.

I started the blog from scratch, exploring wordpress on my own until I figured out how to do what I wanted to do. In retrospect, there are a million resources out there to guide teachers through the process of using blogs and online journals with classes. The most comprehensive list of resources I have found is published on the University of Missouri website at: http://ethemes.missouri.edu/themes/520?locale=en. This only validates my opinion that this is the future of teaching.

As I have continued to learn about blogging, I have discovered how to post important dates, upload class notes, change my theme to reflect the current unit, and embed polls, video, and audio. I have assigned primary sources, webquests, oral history audio bits, primary source video clips, secondary sources, and interactive maps. I cannot say enough how excited I am about this new forum to bring history to students.