Ted Ed Has Cool Videos

Ted Ed has short educational videos on a wide range of topics. Most are animated, through the pairing of an educator (who does the content and the narration) and a professional animator. All of them are accompanied by quizzes or questions to think about and links to other sources. 

For students who think spelling is crazy, try:

• Making sense of spelling, and
• Why is there a "B" in doubt"?

Would you like to encourage your student to reach for a stronger, more lively vocabulary? Recommend The case against "good" and "bad."

For high school students learning about how to analyze literature, see

• In on a secret? That’s dramatic irony
• Situational irony: The opposite of what you think
• What makes a hero?

These are just some of the lessons listed under Language Arts. There are also interesting entertaining videos in many other areas (Science & Technology, Social Studies, and more).

Ted Ed's home page

Washington State History

HistoryLink

HistoryLink.org is a free online encyclopedia of Washington State history. It's been operating since early 1999, and by 2011 had well over 6,000 essays. It's an outstanding resource.

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Washington State Historical Society

The Washington State Historical Society's Featured Collections gives you access to lots of photos, drawings, and maps.

You can see all the tables of contents for Columbia Magazine (the Society's magazine), and selected articles. Topics are varied, for example:

• A Hard Day's Night, Summer 1996, about the Beatles concert in Seattle in 1964
• Sweethearts of Jazz, Winter 2009-10, about black women jazz musicians 
• Beisboleros, Fall 2002, about Latin American professional baseball players, 1914-37
• Let the Law Take Its Course, Spring 2012, about vigilantes in Walla Walla in 1891

The Columbia Anthology "offers a snapshot of Washington history as presented in the pages of COLUMBIA Magazine by our state's leading scholars." It has about 60 articles, arranged by topic (early settlers, explorers, fur trade and missionaries, etc.).

Columbia Kids was an online magazine for kids. It only ran for four issues in 2008-10, but they're all online still and have lots to look at.

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UW Digital Collections

The University of Washington Libraries has a lot of digital resources about the Pacific Northwest, including photos, essays, online exhibits, and maps.

Check out the Seattle Collection to see what our city was like in the past.

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Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest

Based at the UW, the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest supports research, teaching, and public programs. Look under Resources for links and research.

The site has material for an undergraduate course on Washington State history. See the course index page for a list of web pages on different topics with lots of wonderful illustrations. 

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More  Photos

Museum of History and Industry Photo Archive

WSU Libraries Digital Collections

Washington State Archives - Digital Archives

You can find all kinds of things in the archives. For instance, here is a picture of prisoners wrestling from sometime in the 1950s or 1960s.

SeattlePI.com's Photos page includes 79 Historical Photo slideshows, such as Seattle During World War I, Historic Seattle in the Snow, and Seattle History: Northgate Mall.

Northgate Mall, 1965

History Videos Online

I've started a page linking to videos about U.S. history. There are lots of videos on Biography.com and other sites that students can watch on their computers. The videos can fill in a lot that the textbooks don't, and in a livelier, more engaging way.

It's pretty cool that so much is available. You can see FDR giving his first inaugural! You can see Martin Luther King deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington!

True Stories of Quileute Tribe

A couple of years ago, the Twilight books were popular with some of the teen girls at our tutoring center. I'm always happy to see students reading anything, and the Twilight books are appealing because they have interest teens but are comparatively easy to read.  If the movies add a reason to read, all the better.

The stories include a theme about the Quileute Indians being werewolves. They aren't really, of course, but they do have some wolf legends. You can learn more in this post from the Smithsonian Institution and even more in the Real Story of the Quileute Wolves from the Seattle Art Museum. (SAM created an exhibit, which has now traveled to the Smithsonian.)

If you have a student interested in Twilight (and its sequels), it could provide an entree to Native American  culture, Washington State history, or Washington State geography,