Thing #6

I choose Historypin as my Web 2.0 tool.  This is a global community where people share historical pictures and stories with the goal of building up a digital history of the world.  I choose this because my goal is to teach secondary history, and I am always looking for ways to reach out to visual learners.  I actually liked this site so much I saved it to my "favorites" so I can hopefully use it in my future classroom.  The website has won a webby award for best charity non-profit website and they also have a smart phone app you can download.  The first link I visited was an invention timeline: vacuums, radios, toasters, dishwashers, all with historical and background information.  Since part of my standard is technological changes in the mid-20th century, I skipped forward to those dates and looked at pictures of the auto washing machine, the Manchester Mark 1 computer, television, and portable radios.  There was also a Tours and Collections link that took you step by step through a series of pictures that told a story and provided a bit of historical background.  Again, because of my standard, I looked at The March on Washington.  In addition to the series of pictures, there was historical facts, links to youtube videos, and links to additional sites with original documents related to the march.  Because this is a Web 2.0 tool, there is also the chance to contribute your own photos.  It would be a great project for kids to bring in pictures that their grandparents or parents had that could be added to the website.  One of the links is simply "Amazing Grandparents." Students could add pictures of their grandparents to the grandparent "hall of fame."  Overall I think this is a nice resource.  It is a little light on background content, so it would have to be used as a visual supplement to a content rich lesson, but it was fun to explore and I think students would enjoy looking at all of the photos, following up on some of the outside links, and possibly contributing some pictures of their own.

http://www.go2web20.net/app/?a=historypin