Way Back
Let's go back 13,700,000,000 years ago to the Big Bang at an amazing site called: "Evolution -- What Next?" that offers a "timeline of evolution; a chronicle of the universe, the solar system, and the development of life on Earth." Scroll through the timeline and watch the universe unfold with animated graphics and information at each era of history. Students will marvel in the graphical representation of just how much time passed before humans showed up on the timeline. The site does a remarkable job of fitting the entire history on one screen by zooming in on the concentrated parts of the timeline where there's plenty of things happening.

Old News
Google recently announced that they are in the process of scanning and archiving complete collections from 100 different newspapers (they've already been at it with The New York Times and The Washington Post since 2006). You access what has already been collected by going to the Google's News Archive Search. What better way to make history "come alive" than having your students go back to actual articles in newspapers on the topics they're studying. It's one thing to read a textbook about the assassination of Lincoln, for example, and a whole other thing to go and read actual headlines and first-hand reporting of the tragic day from authentic articles written in 1865. The News Archive search does a great job of allowing users to "zoom-in" to the exact date of what you're searching for by offering articles separated by decade. As you get close, it displays a graphic to point out the year of the event. For instance, once I got into the 1800s for my "Lincoln assassinated" search, it highlighted the year that it happened. Articles are presented in a variety of formats, usually in a snapshot of the original. Some articles do cost a fee, but many are free. With Google's announcement that it will support the archives with ads, I expect the fees will go away.

Go Back and Vote
The site, The Living Room Candidate is particularly captivating during an election year. The site houses hundreds of campaign commercials from the current election all the way back to 1952 (Ike and Adlai) and even includes eight lesson plans that are geared for the high school level, but there's so much here for any grade. The collection makes it easy to bring media literacy into the classroom. Ask students to look for different "tactics" of persuasion in the ads. Encourage students to compare and contrast commercials from different years. Ask them if they think the cartoon commercials that Eisenhower used would work today for Obama or McCain. Go through all the years and see if students can identify which candidate ended up winning. Have students graph the Popular Vote, the State Vote, and the Electoral Vote from each election in order to examine and discuss the differences.

Turn Back the Web
One of the most important Web sites out there is the Internet Archive. Among other endeavors, the Internet Archive has the ambitious job of capturing everything ever published on the Internet (or at least as much of it as possible). At the Internet Archive, you can use the "Wayback Machine" to see previous incarnations of websites back to the year 1996. This is an essential mission as much of our world story now takes place on Internet pages that can easily be edited or even deleted. If history is being reported through html, we want to have a backup of it. Here's a great post from Lawrence Lessig's Blog to realize the importance of such a tool (I also highly recommend Lessig's Free Culture book). Teaching students about the Wayback Machine not only shows students the importance of History, but also helps drive home the idea that nothing ever really goes away on the Internet. An important understanding as they post to sites like MySpace.

These sites can be compelling tools to engage students in history by bringing it alive from a machine that H.G. Wells would be proud of.

Bob Sprankle has been a multi-age teacher in Wells, ME for 10 years and has served as the school's Technology Integrator for the past two years.

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