Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History

Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History

A collection of historical documents, photographs, maps and multimedia that enable users to investigate mysteries in Canadian History.

A link is provided to provincial curriculum for ELA, History and Social Studies at different grades.

Support for teachers:  "The Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History websites provide many different kinds of support for teachers using the Mysteries websites in their classrooms: materials that range from student-friendly lesson plans to teacher-oriented, philosophical discussions of the teaching methods advocated by the Mysteries project. Here is a quick overview of the seven kinds of support available to Teachers using the sites – more details are provided below.

• Teachers’ Guides containing a series of detailed lessons, briefing sheets and evaluation materials are available for every Mystery website, and can be downloaded by registering on the site.
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• short, one-lesson, student-oriented MysteryQuest lesson plans, briefing sheets and evaluation materials are available for each Mystery. a series of scaffolding activities and briefing sheets to introduce students to Key Concepts in Historical Thinking.

• a summary of the Foundational Ideas of history teaching that informs the Mysteries Project.
• teachers have access to the password-protected historians’ Interpretations portion of the websites accessible through a Teachers' Login process."

Curriculum Connections:  "The following pages will assist educators/teachers in identifying the connections between the subject matter of the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History and provincial and territorial curricula across the country. All project materials are available in English and French. To assist you with classroom teaching we have developed Teachers’ Guides for each of the Mysteries (grades 6-12, some suggestions suitable for college/university) as well as single-lesson MysteryQuests (ages 11-16). These materials and classroom posters illustrating each of the Mysteries are available online.

While this project was developed primarily as a resource for teaching history in Canada, educators around the world are using it for a variety of subjects in elementary school, secondary school, colleges and universities. Teachers and professors are using the materials to teach courses such as the following: history, social studies, law, native studies, geography, citizenship, drama, English and French, architectural research methods, art history, the criminal justice system, women’s studies, visual arts, language arts, anthropology, sociology, psychology, reading and developing skills in inference and persuasive writing, criminological theory, computer concepts, economics, and sociology."

Posters Available for Download

Next Vista for Learning

Next Vista for Learning
This is a website that houses informational videos.  All videos are for a student audience, highlighting the creativity of students and teachers around the world.

a)  The Light Bulbs Collection  -hits the topics of careers, health & fitness, history & culture, literature & writing, Math, performing arts, science, technology, world languages, inspiration & creativity

b)  Global Views - messages about the world made by students to to help understand other cultures.  They are encouraged to create their own video from their part of the world and submit it

c)  Seeing Service - videos that highlight good deeds (ie microloans, volunteer work in various locations).  These are meant to encourage students to get involved in some sort of cause.

Explain Everything - screencasting for the iPad

Explain Everything is a sophisticated screencasting app for the iPad.  It is a full featured app that doesn't require any account.  The app costs $2.99 but is well worth the price.

This program has many features useful in screencasting:  upload photos from gallery, add arrows, use a pointer, add text and sound.  Great tool for making tutorials or having students demonstrate their understanding of concepts.




Videos can be stored locally on your device as well as being shared with a number of cloud based storage programs such as DropBox.  Videos can also be directly uploaded to YouTube which is a great feature.

Educreations - screencasting on the iPad

Educreations is a simple and free screencasting tool for the iPad.  It allows the user to create tutorial videos using drawing, text, and photos.  Teachers and students can easily use this tool to create lessons or show understanding of a topic.

Requires a free account set up online.  You will also download the app from the iTunes store (iPad only).

While adding text and photos, recording pauses.  Save screencast to local iPad or send to cloud and share the URL with students.  They do not require an account to view these videos.

10 Great YouTube Channels

Slideshow: 10 Great YouTube Channels That Will Make You Smarter

• Veritasium  -science video blog featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science
• Vsauce -videos about many topics including science
• C.G.P Grey -mainly social studies topics (ex. The Vatican Explained, 5 Historical Misconceptions etc)
• Minute Physics  - very short, usually under 5 minutes (ex. How Big is the Universe?)
• Smarter Every Day -all types of science topics (Slow Motion Cat Flipping Physics, Helicopter Speed Limit)
• SciShow   -less than 5 minute videos  (Marie Curie- Great Minds, Why Ferns Have More Chromosomes than You)
• Crash Course -world history, US history, biology, ecology, chemistry, literature
• Numberphile -videos about numbers! (ex. Fibonacci Tartan and Bagpipes, Safecracking with Feynman
• AsapSCIENCE - animated shorts, under 5 minutes (The Science of Goosebumps and Music Chills, Science of Hair Loss/Balding)
• Bad Astronomy -advanced astronomy, space and science (How Much Pressure Does it Take to Crush a Concrete Cylinder)

Citelighter - collect information from the web through your Mozilla Firefox browser

Citelighter is an easy-to-use academic research tool that utilizes a community of students to help you find valuable content, automatically cite sources, and provide an organizational framework for writing your papers."

This service was originally designed to only work as a toolbar add-on application in the Mozilla Firefox browser but they have thankfully updated it to also work on Google Chrome. Staff and students may want to download and install Mozilla or Google Chrome from PortableApps.com onto a portable flash drive or on their desktop.

Math Goes Visual

Math Open Reference Videos

Topics:

• Plane Geometry
• Coordinate Geometry
• Solid Geometry
• Trigonometry
• Calculus

Clea.nr -Extension to Get Rid of YouTube Clutter

http://clea.nr/

This company provides extensions for Safari, Firefox and Chrome to take out the clutter on YouTube.  If you have trouble installing on your computer, please contact your tech coach.  

Those that have the new laptops will be able to add this extension to Chrome for example right away.  

Use ViewPure (see post in blog) if you would like to decide when to have clutter or not as Clea/nr removes the other videos and comments all the time.

Little Bird Tales: Online Storybook Creation

Little Bird Tales:

Capture your child's voice and imagination with this creative story building tool and share them with friends and family.

• Encourages creativity and self expression
• Reinforces reading and writing skills
• Interactive assignments
• Support for teachers

Class Dojo - Keep track of student's positive and negative behaviours online

ClassDojo is an easy way to engage your classroom by recognizing and recording positive or negative behaviors as they happen either online through your classroom computer or on a handheld device.

Free Account!

Improve Behavior

Improve specific student behaviors and engagement by awarding and recording real-time feedback.

Share Data

Print or email beautiful behavior reports to easily engage parents and staff