Monday, October 27, 2008

Yearbook Yourself - Great Resource for Innovative History, Social Studies, and Writing Educators

I came across a site called Yearbook Yourself which allows you to take a photograph of yourself and see how your yearbook picture may have looked from the 1950s all the way to the year 2000. In addition to making the photo the site tells you a bit about the trends of the time. My friends/colleagues and I had a great time making albums of one another and posting them on Facebook. Our other friends and colleagues got a kick out of them too.

It was really cool to imagine myself as a high school senior in each of those eras. The 80s picture happened to look a lot like the big-haired photo I had of myself in my 1985 senior photo that I have, and laugh about today.

As an innovative educator the thought immediately came to mind that this would be a great way to launch an American History unit...letting students really place themselves as they were actually a character in history. I was also thinking that if the social studies/ history teacher and literacy/ writing teacher were working collaboratively this could turn into some interesting writing and projects. I'm sure there are many other great ideas other innovative educators can come up with as well.

Featured along the right of this page are photos of me in the 60s, 70s, 80s, then as a boy in the 90s.

Below you'll see some pictures of one of my colleagues and my director. Take a look, then hop on over to www.yearbookyourself.com and try it out. If you use this idea with your students, please share how it went!








Do you recognize any of them :PPP

4 comments:

  1. OMG...I am loving this site...I am going to use it in the Social Studies class that I push into...Think we will be creating some timelines...and printing out some pics...Great idea...Thank you :-)

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  2. So good to hear Samantha. Please keep me and the rest posted on what happens!

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  3. It really is a fun site, isn't it?!

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  4. I LOVE IT -- this could really get the creative juices flowing for classroom projects. For technology resistant teachers, it gives them a fun motivator to become comfortable with web based applications. Anything to get them using it is a good thing.

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