Teacher Toys

 

So, yesterday I spent about two and a half hours in Microsoft Word, trying to make up a nine-page work packet for a qeography quiz I'll be giving in the next couple of weeks.

What I wanted was fairly straight-forward. I wanted each page divided into two collumns of three boxes of approximately equal size. I wanted to put the same text in each of the boxes on the right and a picture in each of the boxes on the left.



 

Problems:

1. If there is an easy way to make multiple copies of a page in Word, I couldn't find it. (I won't tell you the lengths to which I went trying to do this.)

2. If there is an easy way to insert a picture into the boxes on the left without messing up the fomatting on the page, I couldn't find that either. (Not even creating multiple layers of text-boxes, which is my usual first line of attack in Word.)

3. Copying and pasting lines did not put them in the exact positions I needed them to be in, so I ended up... You know what? It's just too sad to talk about.

Anyway, there I was, getting more and more frustrated and I couldn't figure out why the geniuses at Microsoft hadn't made this easier to do.

"Why?" I asked the ceiling and my surprised four-year-old, who was just trying to watch the Wonder Pets in peace. "Why is this SO HARD?! If I was doing this in PowerPoint, it would take.. about.. three... Oh, man. I am such a moron sometimes.:

My son, seeing that his help was no longer needed, nodded in agreement and turned his attention back to his creepy singing animals.

So, this is how I used PowerPoint to make up my worksheet in less than ten minutes: 

Start a new PowerPoint presentation.

From the menu tabs at the top of the page, select "Design".

Click on the tab that says "Slide Orientation" and choose "Portrait". This means that your slide will be vertical, like a sheet of paper in a worksheet.

Using the "Insert Shapes" commands, divide the page up into grids.

Insert a textbox into one of the boxes where you want text. (There's a certain symmetry to that, isn't there?) Write whatever text you want.

Once you've got the text the way you like it, click on the margins of the textbox, copy it, then paste it into the other boxes in that column.

Choose the page from the page menu on the left side of your screen and copy it several times. You can also use the "Insert Duplicate Slide" command to do this.

Insert pictures into each of the boxes, or copy and paste them from another PowerPoint presentation, then resize them to fit.

Save your work.

Print the slides, copy and staple them.



Go make yourself a refreshing celebratory beverage.

 

For the past three years, my advisory group, the Food Magnet, has sponsored a competition among the other 8th grade magnets in our school. It is based on the television reality show Top Chef and is called the "Slow Fire" Challenge.

On the tv show, in each episode, the contestants are provided with a set of odd ingredients or outragious conditions and are given half an hour to come up with a dish to present to a guest judge. The winner of this "Quickfire" round gets advantages that help him or her later on in the show.

We give the other magnets a week or so to come up with their dishes, so we call our competition a "Slow Fire".

Our rules are simple - create a dish using ingredients we choose and present it to the Food Magnet for judging. After a LOT of deliberation, my magnet decided that this year's ingredients would be chili peppers and some sort of fruit.

We judge each dish according to the Iron Chef criteria:

Each judge can award up to 10 points per dish for its flavor, 1-5 points for its appearance and 1-5 points for its originality and use of the theme ingredients. This year, there were eight students judging and they asked me to judge the dishes as well, so each dish could earn up to 180 points.

Here are the results:

 

 

 

The Food Magnet is proud of the competition and the other 8th graders are proud of the dishes they produced. Feel free to leave comments for them here or on VoiceThreads.

 

After a lot of angst and near-heartbreak, the final projects for the Car Unit are done! (Well, as done as they are going to be; as always, there are a few students who did not complete the project, but overall this one is in the bag.)

Ultimately, in spite of a lot of mid-project frustration, the final product was pretty satisfying. Many of the students put some real work into these interviews and we got some great stories.

A brief overview:

This was the final project for a new interdisciplinary unit my team tried out with this year's 8th grade. The topic of the unit was "Cars" and the theme was "Responsibility". In each of the four core curriculum areas, we used automobiles as a platform to address certain core ideas. In my class (Social Studies), we looked at the history of horse manure in America and how cars were seen as a giant leap forward in social responsibility early in the 20th Century. We looked at Henry Ford and how he changed the face of American Labor and we looked at some of the social changes brought about by car culture.

For their final project in Social Studies, students were told to interview someone over the age of 35 about a lesson that they had learned in Responsibility from cars or driving. Students were given bonus points for each year over the age of 65 their interviewees were. [The goal was to encourage them to go out into the community and learn something from the older residents. Most interviewed their parents, though.]

When they had recorded their interviews the students edited them to around two minutes in length and made a one-slide PowerPoint presentation identifying who the interviewee was, what the essential lesson of Responsibility they took away from the interview was and including a relavent picture (with sources cited).

I took the individual slides and sound files and combined them into longer PowerPoint presentations that we watched in class. We went over each project according to the rubric the class had been given at the beginning of the project and the students participated in my grading of the project.

Once I had four complete PowerPoint presentations (one for each class), I tried to publish them online, so parents and a larger audience could view them. I did this in two ways:

I downloaded a freeware application called iSpring Converter that adds a tab to your PowerPoint menu bar that allows you to more-or-less instantly convert a PowerPoint slideshow into a flash animation movie that you can post on your website. This turned out to be really easy. It will allow us to post the projects directly on the DCS website and the quality of each movie is really good.

The next step was a little trickier.

I used another freeware program called AutoScreenRecorder to record each PowerPoint as it ran in real time, then used Windows Movie Maker to edit it and add the students' soundfiles to it. (I'll go into this in greater detail in a later post.)

This is not a big deal - I learned how to do all this last year on another student project. The bigger problem surfaced when I tried to post these movies online.

In the past, I've published videos of student work to TeacherTube, basically a school-safe version of YouTube. Unfortunately, this time around, there was some sort of glitch in the system. I uploaded one of the videos at school and the website said to hold on, this might take a few minutes, etc..., and after an hour or so, SOMETHING got uploaded to my TeacherTube account, but it wouldn't play and I kept getting odd error messages. I assumed this was a problem of our school's filter or of TeacherTube itself, so after trying again at home, I decided to upload the student movies to YouTube. I figured that it would carry a little more prestige with the students anyway.

My videos uploaded pretty well, but somehow were never ready to play. Finally, this morning, I looked at my YouTube account more closely and realized that - duh - the videos were way too long for YouTube, which does, after all, specialize in short video clips of beer commercials and waterskiing squirrels. (I say this with all the affection in the world. You know at this point the special place YouTube holds in my heart.)

Finally, I ended up uploading the videos to Vimeo, a different online video service, which seems to suit our needs for this particular project better.

Anyway, without any further ado, here are the 2009 student Car Projects:

 
Overall, I would classify this project as a qualified success. I will definitely try it again with next year's class.

Click here to view the New Hampshire State Department of Education Social Studies Frameworks standards adressed by the Car Unit.

 

How is it possible that I've been using PowerPoint like a madman for what - six? seven? years and I never knew about "Rehearse Timings" until now?

Because I'm sort of an idiot.

 

I've been hearing a lot about VoiceThread over the past year or so. Supposedly, it was something like a PowerPoint presentation crossed with Twitter, with a little bit of FaceBook thrown in. VoiceThread presents a very simple slideshow and allows viewers to leave comments along the margins of each page. These can be written, audio or even video comments, which theoretically makes it a very powerful communication tool. It seemed like a creative way for students and the outside world to carry on a conversation about a particular topic, but it's been a bit daunting to me.

After six months or so of tiptoeing around it, I decided to give VoiceThread a real try. In my Food Magnet, my students periodically do "tastings" of new foods - discuss them, rate them, make notes in their tasting journals, etc... - and I thought that would be a pretty good forum for them to use this tool.

For our first time out, I had my students test various folk remedies for eating a too-spicy pepper. I used my digital camera and my new Flip Video camera to take pictures and video of them trying different remedies. I used my TuneTalk to record their observations, which I edited into audio files later.

For this first VoiceThread adventure, I had each student identify him/herself before each comment, so I would know who was who later on when I edited the sound clips. A couple of the students used their last names, so bleeped them out while I was doing the editing. In the future, when students are recording and posting their own comments, that won't be necessary.

Here is our first attempt:

This seems like a promising start.

I'm going to have the students in my Magnet create their own avatars and have them post their own comments on the foods we taste from now on. VoiceThread allows them the choice of using a microphone to record their comments on the spot, upload soundfiles (like the ones I used in this slideshow), type their comments or even phone them in on their cellphones.

Time will tell, but for now, I'm going to provisionally love this new toy.

 

 

I'm driving myself crazy. And to understand why, you have to know something about how I go about home-improvement projects:

[Please bear with me - this really is going somewhere.]

Before and during any new home-improvement project - putting up a fence, tiling a floor, ect... - I get totally obsessed. I think constantly about the step-by-step process of prepping the walls, digging post holes or taping off trim with blue painter's tape. I'll wake up out of a sound sleep, sit bolt-upright in bed and say, "Drop cloths! I need more drop cloths!"

(At which point, my wife will mutter something about having to work in the morning and roll over in a huff. She really should have thought things through more carefully before marrying me.)

I think the problem comes from the fact that almost everything I try is a bit of a fiasco the first time around. That's one thing when I'm trying a new recipe, but when we're talking about making some permenant change to the house we live in, I'm hesitant to inflict a botched job on my family. (Not to mention our poor house itself - hasn't it been through enough already?)

Now, take that attitude and translate it to the classroom. (Did you just shudder a little? I did.)

This past month, I tried a new project with my students. Because it is the first time I've ever done this project, I did not expect perfection, but things have... well, they haven't quite turned out... um,...

Okay, it seems that there's no delicate, understated, British-sounding way to put this - this project has bitten the big, rotten radish of sucky-ness and spit it out into the trashcan of dispair.

A little background:

This year's 8th Grade class is a particularly challenging one. Individually, they are great kids, but collectively, they are an insanely frustrating group of students. They generally don't listen, follow directions, meet deadlines or do any challenging work. Faced with bad grades in the face of lack of effort, a lot of them will shrug and say, "Whatever, Dude... I'll take the zero."

[Let me reiterate: Each of these students is a really great kid. It's easy to forget that when talking about their frustrating group dynamic. Each of them deserves quality teaching from me, no matter what that takes.]

So I've been working really hard to think outside of the box and come up with projects and activities that frame material in a non-traditional way. I want to engage them and get them to invest themselves in what we're doing in class. This latest project is my most recent stab at that.

We just wrapped up a multi-disciplinary unit with the topic of Cars. The thought was that this was something that would engage them - particularly the boys - and would lend itself to an interdisciplinary approach. I would cover the history of cars in America, my Math colleague would teach them about calculating interest rates, our Science teacher would work with them on calculating their carbon footprint and in Literacy, they would learn a bit about media literacy and how to read a commercial.

So far, so good.

In addition, the theme of the unit was Responsibility. In each class, we'd touch on how responsible behavior is totally tied up in every aspect of car use and ownership.

Again, sounds good.

The actual lessons in the unit worked out awfully well. I came up with a good PowerPoint to kick off the unit, then spent a couple of days teaching them about the impact of horse manure on American cities and how by 1920 or so, buying a car was seen as an incredibly responsible act - both socially and ecologically. (Nobody ever imagined what it would be like once we had 300 million of them on the road.) I had a load of horse manure delivered to the back parking lot at school, which we went out and inspected in WAY more detail than the students really wanted to. I brought in a large animal veterinarian with parasites in jars to talk about horse poop in detail and what the daily life of urban draft horses would have been like. I presented a couple of lessons on Henry Ford and how he changed Labor in America. We discussed the ways that cars changed society and how each of those changes brought its own load of responsibility with it.

At this point, I was feeling pretty good; in retrospect, probably over-confident.

For their final project for this unit in Social Studies, I showed the students a PowerPoint with stories from the StoryCorps project. Their assignment was to record a StoryCorps-style interview with an adult about a lesson in responsibility they had learned from driving or being in a car. I told them that their interviewee had to be at least 35 years old and I gave them bonus points if he or she was older than 65. The students were supposed to record the interview, edit the soundfile to about two minutes, save it in their folder on the school server and put together a one-slide PowerPoint presentation about who the person they'd interview was and what they had learned about Responsibility from the interview. (The idea being that I would combine them into one large presentation afterward.) I let students sign out MP3 players to record the interview and I gave them two days of class time with computers to do the work. At the end of that time, a lot of students said they needed more time, so I extended the deadline for another three days and made myself and the computers available after school.

The students wrote the rubric for this project down in class. The instructions for saving and naming their work were posted on the board and I went over the directions verbally at the beginning and end of each class period.

Almost none of the students followed the directions.

Pretty much all of them went out and got the interview. I thought that would be the hard part, but they were very excited about that. The problem was that they saved their work in folders on individual computers or in different folders on the server. They did not name their files the way I had asked them to. When they saved their soundfiles in Audacity, they "saved" them, instead of exporting them. (A natural mistake, but again, we went over this EVERY class!) Some of them didn't make a slide at all and the ones who did, did not follow the rubric that they had written down.

As a result - if I were to grade them today - almost half of my students have failed this project. In one of my classes, only ONE student followed directions!

So this is where I'm at right now:

I'm very frustrated and angry with myself. I had really high hopes for this project and it's really heartbreaking to see it fizzle out like this. Given how badly this group of students follow directions and follow through with things generally, giving them another extension to finish this project feels like coddling them, enabling their work-ethic issues and setting them up for failure next year in high school. It's very tempting to blame them for what's happened.

On the other hand, numbers don't lie. If the majority of students failed to follow directions, there has to have been something wrong with the directions. The fault has to lie largely with me. That's very frustrating. These guys really need me to come through for them - more than most classes - and I seem to have let them down.

So what to do...

Looking back on it, I realize that I probably should have given them a checklist with the project requirements on it to check off as they got to each stage of the project. I made one up for next year's group while this was all fresh in my mind, so, I think I'll give this group a copy of that checklist next Monday. I'll explain the situation and give them an additional two days to change file names, rewrite slides and save things to the correct folders, checking themselves off on the list as they go, then I'll grade the work on Wednesday.

So, I guess the lesson to take away from all this is...

Um...

Well, I think my inabillity to identify the lesson here is one of the reasons I find myself in this position to begin with.

Teaching is not for the weak, is it?

If you've read this far, you are a very kind and patient person. Thank you. If you have any comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear them. If you can identify the lesson I should be picking up here, I'd be doubly grateful. If you can think of a way to motivate and connect with these students, I'll make you any PowerPoint of your choice  - maybe for life!

This past week, I found myself teaching an unlikely lesson to our 8th graders - the importance of horse manure in American History. (Surprisingly, it is a HUGE part of our development as a nation.)

Anyway, I was showing a PowerPoint to my students of pictures I had taken a couple of years ago on a photo-tour of Beacon Hill in Boston. I'd noticed that most of the ritzy old houses had bootscrapers mounted on the front steps and knowing that I could use this someday in class, I started taking pictures of each one we came to. At first, the other people on the tour just gave me surprised looks and quizzical smiles, but then after a while, they started to gravitate toward my wife and ask if I had "issues".

I was explaining this to my class when one of my students interupted me and asked, "Oh, you mean like your 'issues' with PowerPoint?"

It's a fair point - I use PowerPoint a LOT in my classroom. I should probably move on and learn newer and better tools, but I'm still getting so much out of this one program that for the forseeable future, I'm afraid I'll look at most classroom computer applications as PowerPoint and Other Stuff.

[I did have a TeacherFeelGood moment last week involving PowerPoints. I was kicking off a new unit with a PowerPoint. A new girl was sitting in the front row and when I announced that we'd have a short PowerPoint, she put her head in her hands in dispair. The boy next to her tapped her on the shoulder and said, "No. It's okay - he's really good!" It made me feel like Mr. Kotter.]

Anyway, I've discovered another cool new PowerPoint trick.

I was directed to a REALLY interesting podcast by a colleague on a Social Studies forum. It discussed the idea of "non-linear PowerPoints" - in other words, slideshows that are not designed to be viewed in any particular order. (A good example of this is the Jeopardy PowerPoint I discussed in the previous post.)

The ideas they discussed got me thinking about how I use PowerPoint and how useful it might be to help students review for Geography quizzes. I'm a big fan of online mapping games. They are really useful to drive home a geography lesson - if there happens to be a game out there that deals with the particular lesson you've just taught. Unfortunately, for about half of my geography lessons, the places and features that I want my students to memorize are pretty eclectic and aren't the sort of items that you're likely to find on a mapping game.

Take my lesson on New Hampshire, for instance.

I ask my students to memorize each of the counties and several cities, rivers, mountains and lakes in New Hampshire. These are good and worthy things for my particular class to know, but let's face it, this is not universally vital knowledge. Nobody is going to put the Ashuelot River on a mapping game designed for wide distribution.

But what if I designed a PowerPoint with a map of New Hampshire and put all those features on the map? I could outline each city, county, feature, etc... with an invisible box, then link each one to a slide that identified it. Svetlana and Bruno, my hypothetical students, would point their cursors to the weird, obscure river in the southwest corner of the state, take their best guess as to what it is, then click it to see the answer. They would jump to the appropriate slide, go, "Ohhhhh... THAT Ashuelot River!" then click another link to take them back to the main map.

They'd be mapping geniuses!

So, does it work? Is it all rainbows and unicorns?

Um. Acutally, yes.

It was actually very easy and even my first interactive studyguide went together in an hour or two. (Future ones should be a little faster.)

There are just a few tricks. Here's what I learned:

1. Use the FreeForm drawing tool to outline counties, countries, rivers, lakes, etc... It will be easier to do this if you zoom in and view the shape at several hundred percent of its actual size. (See my previous post on outlining for more information.)

 

 

2. When you've outlined the feature you're interested in linking a page to, make sure it's selected, then choose, Insert/Hyperlink/Place In This Document.

 

3. When highlighting a city (which is too small to make an easily clickable link) or a really irregular shape like Lake Winnepesaukee, outline it with a circle (or a square or a trapezoid, if that's more your style), then format it to be 100% transparent - in other words, invisible. Make sure you do this for the outline and for the fill.

4. Select all the pages, then choose "Animation" and format the transitions between pages so that you can't move on to the next page by time OR by clicking. (Uncheck the boxes.) This means that your students will only be able to navigate by clicking your hyperlinks and not accidentally moving onto the wrong page by hitting the spacebar or anything.

If you want to take a look at my first attempt at interactive, non-linear, hyper-awesome PowerPoints (or if you need a studyguide for New Hampshire), feel free to download it here.

 

Several years ago, I found an amazing PowerPoint presentation online and immediately, exuberantly and shamelessly stole it.

It was a template for a round of Jeopardy that could be customized with any topics, questions, pictures, sounds, etc..

It worked so well that I started using it to review with my classes before all major exams. (This one on the left is to review before our Geography Final Exam. The catagory "Cute Boys, Hot Girls", by the way, deals mostly with Hummel figurines and saunas. It's never too early to introduce teenagers to the concept of Bait and Switch.)

This tool was so cool that over time, I tended to show it off to any teacher who would stand still long enough for me to shove my laptop in their face. Almost everyone's response (after, "Hey! Get that laptop out of my face!") was "Wow! Where can I get that?"

Unfortunately, I was somehow never able to find it online again. I went under the assumption that Viacom's lawyers had had the website taken down or something, so I generally passed on my copy of the basic template to other teachers on disk.

Jump ahead several years:

Lately, I've been enthusiastically right-clicking all sorts of images and choosing the "Properties" icon.

A few days ago, I had the WAYYYYY-overdue brainstorm of doing this to my Jeopardy PowerPoint template.

Yup.

There it was under "Authors". This PowerPoint was designed by a guy named Matt Hamlyn and was worked on by some guy named John...

Oh, wait - that's me.

Anyway, I googled "Matt Hamlyn" and the first search result to come up said, "If you're looking for the Jeopardy PowerPoint, go to this link..."

"Doh!"

Anyway, if you'd like to download a very cool tool for your classroom, please go to Matt Hamlyn's website at:

http://staff.fcps.net/mhamlyn/ppt.htm

I'll be over in the corner trying to figure out how doorknobs work and other hard stuff like that.

This is a very cool new tool I discovered a few months ago, but just started using in a big way recently.  Basically, TinEye is a reverse Google-Images search. It takes pictures you already have and finds them online:

Let's say you have a picture that you want to find on the internet. This one, for example.

It's a good picture. You know you can use it in a lesson, but it's really too small. When you try to insert it into a PowerPoint, it gets all pixelated and grungy. You know there just has to be a higher resolution copy of this picture somewhere. Plus, you don't really know much about the picture itself - you don't remember where you found it and being the good role-model that you are, you'd like to cite your source.

This is where TinEye comes in.

Using TinEye, you can choose this picture, then ask this application to search the internet for this image.

TinEye will search around for images that match yours for a few seconds, then come back with as many matches for your picture as possible.

Because this particular image is pretty well-known, I got a LOT of matches - more than 500. I can look at the size of the images on the menu of pictures (the pixel size is listed underneath the thumbnail image of the picture) and choose to look at just a matching image or to see it in context on a webpage.

About half the time I've used TinEye, it has come up empty - some of the pictures I've searched for have been too obscure for it to find matches for. But, as TinEye will be the first to tell you, it is a very big Internet out there and they are adding more places to search all the time, so every week, there is a better chance of finding what you are looking for.



Two other ways to use TinEye:

1. Let's say that you are surfing the internet and you find a picture that you like...mostly. Maybe it's too small or isn't exactly what you want, but you know that you could really use some version of that picture.

Right click the picture and select "Properties" to find out its URL (web address), then plug that into TinEye and let it do a search for you. That way, you don't have to bother downloading a picture you aren't quite happy with and cluttering up your folders or desktop.

 

2. If you find yourself using TinEye a lot, you might want to download their browser plugin. This is an application that you download to your computer that will allow you to skip a step in doing a TinEye search. If you find one of those pesky almost-good-enough pictures and want to do a search for it, all you have to do is right-click the picture and select "Search Image on TinEye" from the pop-up menu.

I've been using TinEye a lot the past week or two and I'm growing to depend on it more and more. I like it a lot.

Here is a video tutorial on how to use TinEye from YouTube (not viewable from DCS, of course):

It was the fresh cactus in the window that got me in trouble.

I was running some errands in Manchester this afternoon and drove by a market I've never been in before.

This is somewhat dangerous, because I'm a bit obsessed with food and small, hole-in-the-wall ethnic markets, and you're not going to find many places much more ethnic or hole-in-the-wall-y than this place. Given that I was driving in one of the residential areas of the city, where the streets are only a lane and a half wide at the best of times and that there are still snowbanks from the last snowstorm to contend with, AND double-parking seems to be more the rule than an exception, this was probably not the best place for me to be distracted while I was driving.

Anyway, I managed to pull over, make an quasi-legal 23-point turn and park in front of Empire Foods, a very cool, pocket-sized bodega in Manchester's "Tree Street" neighborhood.

I went in.

Which is kind of deceptive. To say I "went in" implies that I had some sort of choice, that I could have stood out there in front of a strange, new bodega and after some thought, turn and walk calmly back to my car and drive away instead of being sucked into the store like a hard-boiled egg into a milk bottle.

Anyway, I walked in and was immediately hypnotized by all the cool stuff - mostly Mexican ingredients like dried herbs and mysterious canned goods - on display. The guy behind the counter seemed fairly suspicious of me and the longer I looked around, the more bemused he became.

(Cool word, huh? Bemused - it's worth 20 grains of rice at FreeRice.com.)

Anyway, after a few minutes, he came right out and asked me what a guy like me was doing in his store. (Clearly, I don't represent his usual customer demographic.) I told him that I'd seen the nopales - fresh cactus paddles - in his window.

He brightened up and said, "OH! You're from Texas!" (This seemed to clear things up, at least a little bit, for him.)

I told him, no - I just like food.

He thought this over for a few seconds, then smiled. Apparently, this was an answer he could really get behind.

We chatted for a few more minutes then I felt I needed to buy something before I left. I'd been intrigued by several 1-liter bottles of some canary-yellow beverage in a glass bottle. When I picked it up, it had a warning about pregnant women and operating heavy equipment, so I ended up buying it.

(I've had several glasses of it now, which probably explains the rambling nature of this post. I'm not worried though. I know it must be good for me - it has a cow on the label.)

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I have a new friend and new store and a bottle with a cow on it, so life is looking pretty good.

Oh...

So, what does any of this have to do with the classroom?

Um.... Give me a second....

Aha! I've got it!

When I got home, I added Empire Foods to my Awesome Food Map.

For the past few months, I've been adding all the grocery stores and restaurants I visit to a custom map on GoogleMaps. This allows me to share cool new finds with friends and family. Each place is marked on a map that allows them to find out a little bit about each place, look at it on a satellite photo and even find driving instructions on how to get there.

Now, imagine using this in a classroom setting to map all the Civil War battles in your state or all the places Flat Stanley has visited or all the places that various ancestors came from during a Family Tree project - you start to see the potential.

I already do a project like this with my students during our Civil War unit. I'll post more about it when we get to it.

In the meantime, please enjoy my Awesome Food Map: