Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Category: history

  • Spinning a Revised History of Genghis Khan with Media and Exhibits

    Shelly, Rachel and I are in Philadelphia for several days attending the ISTE Conference, and spent a couple hours this evening exploring the new Genghis Khan exhibit at the Franklin Institute. I was especially keen to experience this exhibit since I  downloaded and listened to most of Dan Carlin’s enthralling “Wrath of the Khans” series on…

  • Creativity, Connectedness and the Adjacent Possible

    One of my favorite quotations is by Steven Johnson, who asserts that “Chance favors the connected mind.” Who we associate with, the environments in which we live and work, and the historical context in which we live have a profound impact on our creativity and the ideas to which we are exposed and develop. In…

  • American Revolution Videos from Schoolhouse Rock and Discovery United Streaming

    Today we had a lot of teachers absent from school for different reasons and were shorthanded for substitute teachers. As a result, instead of having a planning day, I was a 5th grade substitute teacher. The day’s main lesson focused on different elements of the American Revolution. Instead of just having the students read in…

  • 8th Grade GeoMap Project For English: Road to Hiroshima

    My 8th grade daughter asked me over the weekend if I had any ideas for a project she could do in her English class related to John Hersey’s book, “Hiroshima,” which her class just finished reading. My first thought was a GeoMap project, which would overlay statistics about the numbers of Japanese and U.S. soldiers…

  • Highlights from the 2013 Trappers Rendezvous Campout

    This past weekend was the 36th annual “Trappers Rendezvous” campout near Hutchinson, Kansas, and over six thousand Boy Scouts and parents descended on the area to enjoy the great weather and a swap meet like no other. This was my third year to attend the Trappers Rendezvous with my son, and in this post I’ll…

  • Common Core Writing Lesson With AudioBoo: 9/11 Narrated Art

    (Cross-posted from the Yukon Public Schools Learning Showcase website) Kayleen Browning teaches 6th grade Social Studies at Yukon Middle School. This year, she asked her students to identify a word which summarized things they had studied and learned about the 9/11 attacks in 2001 by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mrs.…

  • Playing With Media and the Story of the American West

    Perhaps because I grew up in New England (and still live here) or perhaps because I watched too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie when I was a kid, I have always been fascinated with the American West. And because of that fascination, the story of the westward expansion of the United States…

  • Digitizing Vintage Photographic Negatives and Prints

    These are my notes from Tom Rieger‘s presentation, “Digitizing Vintage Photographic Negatives and Prints” at the 2012 International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tom is the Director of Imaging Services for the Northeast Document Conservation Center. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. From the NEDCC website: NEDCC’s mission…

  • Additional Books to Read on the POW/MIA Situation in Southeast Asia

    The connections made possible via Internet-based publishing and communication can be both enlightening and challenging. When I was a cadet at the US Air Force Academy in the late 1980s / early 1990s, I wrote a paper about U.S. Prisoners of War (POWs) who were left behind in Southeast Asia following the formal end of…

  • 7th Regiment Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, Bushwhackers, and Jayhawkers (Kansas in 1861 – 1865)

    This is a 10 minute video interview recorded on January 14, 2012, at the Trapper’s Rendezvous campout west of Newton, Kansas. This historian shares some history about Kansas in the U.S. Civil War. He provided background about the 7th Regiment Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, the Bushwhackers, Jayhawkers, Quantrill’s Raiders and the scorched earth tactics which eventually…