Nations Classroom Blog

Are you heading to D.C. this year?  This week one of the most popular D.C. museums just made an exciting announcement.

The New Year has brought new changes to the D.C. parking scene, which is good news for our tour groups traveling via motorcoaches.  Did you know that according to the National Park Service, 1,200 motorcoaches arrive each day in D.C. during peak travel season.  Luckily for our student tour groups, traveling D.C. by motorcoach just got easier.

As a high school AP Language and Composition English teacher, the Newseum’s free app Today's Front Pages caught my attention.  I’m always looking for new ways for my students to analyze non-fiction texts in my classroom.  The app claims to bring the front pages of hundreds of newspapers worldwide daily to your phone or tablet.  The best part? It’s free. So could it live up to its claim? I had to see for myself.

The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia offers a thoughtful look at the impact of the musical Hamilton in this review of a new book that delves into the topic. 

"The genius of Hamilton lies in its ability to offer both those who have long owned the narrative and those who have been excluded from it a place in America’s foundational story. "

On July 24th 1897, Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas.  Most of us know that Earhart went on to be the first woman to pilot a plane solo across the Atlantic Ocean, after which she was awarded the United States Distinguished Flying Cross.  Amazingly, her accomplishments for the aviation industry did not end there - read below for five more fascinating facts about Amelia Earhart’s life.

Wrapping up this series is one final Google App that helps us power our trip - Google Forms. Forms is a data collector. Its uses are unlimited! If you want to collect, well, ANYthing, a Google Form can do this for you.

Forms itself is simple to start and use - as simple as a collection of names, phone numbers, and email addresses, but as complex as a medical questionnaire where your next question depends on your previous answer - and everything in between. Let me give you some examples.

I highlighted the benefits of Google Sites, Sheets, the Drive app, and Calendar in previous posts. Next up in the Google Blog Series is how Google Docs makes planning your school trip much easier.

Here’s what we’ve covered so far in our Google Blog Series: Google can help in countless ways when it comes to planning a trip.  If you missed my previous blogs, I discussed the benefits of using Google Sites as a warehouse for trip documents and Google Sheets as a powerhouse for sending personal emails in bulk.  The next integral pieces we will cover in this article are accessing Google Drive on your Goggle App and using Google Calendar.

Google Sheets and formMule make it possible for educational trip leaders to improve the efficiency of our email communication by sending personalized emails in bulk. I'll explain more in this article, which is the second in a six-part series about how to use Google applications to help make your student trip planning and execution easier.