If you are doing a unit on the Russian Revolution, you might want to consider showing your students Biography's "Vladimir Lenin: Voice of Revolution." We have a complete, teacher-friendly review of the documentary available here. We also have a free, printable note-taking worksheet for students. This is great for making sure that students pay attention when you play the video.
| Qwiki looks to be a lot of fun. The gist of it is that you click on a topic. A video/flash screen starts playing out the definition or description of the topic. Pictures flash across the screen, and text scrolls along the bottom of the screen, all while a voice (one that sounds like text-to-speech software) reads the text from the screen. Pros: You can see and learn about a topic (e.g., Lake Titicaca, cheetah, World War II) very quickly with a lot of pictures. Cons: The text-to-speech can be a bit off (oddly pronounced words*). The speech is read quite quickly (perhaps to keep each description to a minute or less), meaning that struggling readers may find it hard to keep up (if they try to read along). And honestly, the voice speaks so quickly that it was hard for us to keep up. In some of the descriptions we viewed, the presentations merely proved the point that complicated events (such as World War II) can never be properly explained in 60 seconds. Our Review and Rating: We are torn. Our guess is that students will generally like Qwiki, some teachers will like it, but most teachers will hate it. As teachers, we see ourselves hating it for the same reason we would have loved it as students. Picture it...the big World History exam days away. We (as students) have a giant list of terms to know. We go to Qwiki and enter each term. In a minute per term, we have enough superficial knowledge to pass the test with a decent grade. You may be thinking...but wait! You have hundreds upon hundreds of quiz games that test "superficial" and "trivial" knowledge! Yes, that's true. But we also have creative lesson plans, DBQs that launch thoughtful discussions, and much more. Qwiki has great potential as a teaching and learning tool, but we fear for students who zone out for the semester, use Qwiki to pass tests, and end up with little or no true comprehension. |
| *We have implemented text-to-speech software on our website as read-alongs to some of our images. We love using this software, but there are drawbacks. The software (no matter how good it is) never truly sounds human. And, no matter how good it is, there are a lot of words that are mispronounced. Often, when preparing a video or sound clip with text-to-speech software, we find ourselves scrambling to write terms and names phonetically so that the software will pronounce them correctly. With Qwiki (at least in its current version), it appears that programmers inputted the text without later checking the pronunciation. Hopefully, future updates will fix this bug. |
| Happy New Year! We have been busy, busy, busy. Over the holidays, we caught the crafting bug. We designed and made a large number of promotional tote bags. If you are interested in "toting" around the Student Handouts message, please send us at email at studenthandouts@gmail.com with your name and mailing address, and we'll put a tote bag in the mail to you. Put "Tote Bag" as the subject of your email. |
| What's new this month? You may have noticed that several of the web pages have a new design. This "full page" design has received some rave reviews, so we intend to continue incorporating it into the site. |
| We have started a "Back to School Guide for Parents." It still needs a bit of polish, but feel free to take a look and share your thoughts. |
| Did you know that this web site is ranked in the top 300,000 of all American web sites? This may not seem impressive at first glance, but it's excellent for a small-time web site created from scratch by non-computer people less than three years ago! In the last year, we have gone from about 200 daily visitors to over 2,000 visitors per day. Keep spreading the word! |
Happy holidays! It is December, and the season of shopping is upon us. You'd be surprised by how much money we can spend while taking mini-breaks from working on this website!
So much has happened with this site in the last month. We have been updating individual pages, which has created a few glitches. If a page looks a bit wonky, have no fear...we are working on the problem.
We are also working to improve and increase our interactive vocabulary games. It's a lot of work, but we as well as you want to have online vocabulary games for each of our college-prep vocabulary lists. This task is underway, and we will hopefully make a lot more progress by the new year.
As you know, the educational image galleries continue to grow. Keep your fingers crossed that we maintain our momentum!
We have likewise changed the layout of a few pages, particularly the citations and graphic organizers. Some of you have reported back that the pages load more quickly, which is terrific. We were hoping for this. We were also trying to mix things up a bit by making the individual web pages more varied. The "same" is good for the most part, in terms of users always being able to find the information they need on a page, but a little diversity helps to keep the eyes from tiring.
