CCSU Veterans History Project

Sunday’s Hartford Courant had a timely story about the Veterans History Project at Central Connecticut State University. The article highlighted how the project provided one man with information that lead to a meeting with his late father’s shipmate. Check out the full article. The Veteran’s History Project has videos of interviews with veterans and other resources.

Perhaps this article struck me since just last week the Railway Museum in Willimantic was vandalized. Seeing the swastika on the engine was very painful especially since many of the museum’s volunteers lived during World War II. The vandalism was caused by teens home from school due to local elections. Most teens have no connection or understanding of the times of WWII. At the personal level the article moved me since my mother’s family is Jewish and my 83 year old father is a veteran of the army and although he doesn’t talk about it much, it greatly affected him (and probably why he opposes the Iraq war).

I thought this would be a good learning opportunity for students. Information following the article states, “If you are a veteran interested in sharing your story, or would like to volunteer to conduct interviews, contact project director Eileen Hurst at 860-832-2976 or hursteim@ccsu.edu.”

Embedding html into Assignment Instructions

The neatest idea that I learned from the DE Virtual Conference from Oct. 24 was that you can embed html instructions into the assignments created for students. One example used Blabberize to provide engaging instructions recorded by the teacher.

Discovery Education for Instruction

During the last few weeks, I’ve been learning not just about the media resources and the middle school science, but with many others. So I’ll just focus on one link I found that actually brings you to the Discovery Channel games. This area is free for anyone, not just Discovery Education subscribers. I was particularly intrigued with “Nefertiti Resurrected” — probably because I remember reading about her an elementary student.

Link to Nefertiti Resurrected http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/nefertiti/evidence/evidence.html 

Link to Discovery Channel’s Interactives for more topics such as dinosaurs, ancient china, and the Titanic http://dsc.discovery.com/games/games-tab-04.html 

(When I was 9 years old, I discovered the biography section and became interested in the females. I had read in one about the limited opportunities for women in the past and then devoted myself to reading their biographies.)