Teacher Blog on History Tech

When looking at History Tech, a blog written by Glenn Wiebe, one can see many a post about educational technology. He often goes to educational conferences specifically designed for technology and then writes on his experiences. Ultimately, his writing is very friendly and it is obvious that he cares about inspiring history teachers to use technology in the classroom as well as in their lesson planning to help them stay organized.

It is very clear that he understands technology. On his blog there are many interesting tools and gadgets that he has used in order to make his site look very professional. One instance of this is the very first thing you see on his page. It is a slide show detailing the most popular posts on his site that is very well done. Just looking at this alone made me excited to see what else he had on his page because it was so vibrant and full of interesting lesson plan ideas and internet history resources.

Then, the first official post he made was about a recent conference he had been to that taught him and other fellow teachers how to use Flipboard. This is an app that helps people organize their interests in a way that feels like an online magazine. The point of his post was to detail the purpose of Flipboard, but also to inform the readers of everything that he learned at the conference. I found this post to be very helpful, not only because his explanations and instructions were very clear and helpful, but also because it is very obvious that he was inspired to use this in his lesson planning. His excitement made me just as excited to get into my future classroom and use Flipboard as well as any other tool I could to make my lessons more applicable to my students!

He provided eight possible methods for including students in classroom discussion and organizing historical research through Flipboard and then he gave nine tools and resources to help anyone who might be at a loss on how to use the application or how to teach their students how to use it. His ideas included adding primary sources to Flipboard to help give students more access as well as using the app to create a dialogue between students. Not only this, but his tools and resources that he provides are from a wide range. He mentions professional websites as well as YouTube for different perspectives on Flipboard from multiple experts. Mr. Wiebe has definitely created a site that is beyond useful for inspiration and new ideas for the history classroom.

I definitely think that this blog is a useful tool for me as I plan my future classroom. Mr. Wiebe’s blog has more than enough examples of resources and tools and it is updated fairly regularly. I plan to incorporate technology in my classroom more often than not, simply because of the fact that I will be teaching secondary students that will not only understand technology but whose lives are completely surrounded by it. It is very important to be knowledgeable of the new technologies available to us and Mr. Wiebe’s blog is definitely a useful tool for keeping up with the latest trends.