Blog Watch: History Meets Technology in Practice

Teacher Nate Kogan’s blog The History Channel This Is Not… has plenty to recommend it, not only to fellow history teachers, but also to all educators who are grappling with how to intelligently integrate the ever-expanding list of online tools into practice.

In a post that brings together these two strands, Kogan writes about using Wikipedia in a U.S. history survey course. Students, he discovered, had been instructed repeatedly not to use Wikipedia, "because anyone could edit it, and therefore the site (undoubtedly edited by nefarious internet goblins) might lie to them." However, he found them invariably drawn to the site anyway.

In a way that shows—rather than tells—teachers how to use new online tools, he embeds the assignment document into his blog, using the versatile publishing tools of Scribd. The assignment asks students to review and edit history-related Wikipedia pages—and it's easy to see how teachers in other content areas could adapt the assignment for their students.

More recently, Kogan shared his experience using online tools such as TinyChat and Drop.io to connect with absent students, which could be especially useful during flu season; described using Google Forms to conduct a quiz; and even posted a video of a student exercise that involved using active learning to describe early civilizations.

Read Kogan's blog at http://nkogan.wordpress.com.