Graphic Syllabus

Piktochart – Service to make graphic syllabi or infographics.  You can make 5 resources for free after that there is a yearly fee.  Here are a couple of examples I’ve made, one is from my U.S. Women’s History class and the other is from my U.S. survey course – The Foundations of Modern America.

Classroom Engagement

JeopardyLabs – Online  jeopardy template that allows you to enter questions and answers into the program for play in-class.  I’ve used it as a means to engage students with out-of-class readings and break-up a standard seminar style discussion.  You can see my Jeopardy Board for the historiography readings on Marxism.

Foundations Timeline – Uses H5P.com timeline content type that allows you to build a chronological sequence of events. For each event, you may add images and texts, including assets from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud.  I created this one for my HIS 120: Foundations of Modern America Class.

Dominion of New England Maps – Uses  an H5P. com image blender (Agamotto) to easily demonstrate changes on maps or images.  I’ve created one to show New England colonies before, during, and after the Dominion of New England.

Patriotic Ladies at Edenton in North Carolina – Uses H5P.com Image Hotspots content type to  add information pop-ups to images.  This is an excellent tool for explaining political cartoons and other complex images.

English Bill of Rights 1689 – Uses H5P.com Drag and Drop content type to create activities that allows students to link certain types of content together.  In this activity I take a difficult to understand document and have students link a more understandable definition to the difficult phrases/passages in the document.

United States Constitution, 1789 uses H5P.com course presentation content type to provide an interactive US Constitution with dialogue boxes that asks students questions about the original US Constitution.

Comics and Juvenile Delinquency in the 1950s uses several different types of H5P.com content to provide interactive activities about how the comic book industry was linked to rising juvenile crime rates in the 1950s.

The Industrial Revolution and the Family Economy uses H5P.com course presentation content type to examine the impact of the Industrial Revolution on American families.

Video Lecturing

One way to spice up an online lecture is to add a short animation to explain a concept.  One of the easy animation tools I’ve discovered is Mysimpleshow.com.  It allows you to build a short clipart type of animation with a computer voice over or one that you do yourself.  These animations can then be used to spice up an online lecture.  Here are a couple that I’ve created: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and The American System.