Hippocampus is the part of the brain most effected by mental auguish and trauma--hmmmm

Perusing the "The World Is Open" website with the links listed by the chapters in which Bonk refers to them could take hours. The sheer volume of choices and possibilities for educational tools as well as entertainment is astounding. That perhaps is where my greatest unease about the internet surfaces--all the choices and all the avenues for deviating off the original goal and intent. If procrastination is a guilty pleasure then the internet is a procrastinator's Shangri-La where one thing leads to many things to all things. Look for a title of a particular book on the internet and end up watching a documentary on a religion that you've never heard of. But as the internet allows you to do and as I am doing here, I digress.
As a starting off point for a lengthy history lesson, (World War II) or to delve into the background of a novel's setting (To Kill a Mockingbird) I believe the http://Hippocampus.org web site can serve as a resource for both teacher and students. I clicked on U.S History on that site and I was impressed by the level of detail and the way the subject matter was organized. There was accompanying text if you wanted to read along with the video and I thought the sources, pictures and audio were all well integrated. You can browse a history lesson or even a mini-history lesson and pick a particular topic within that lesson such as "Native American confrontations" within the Manifest Destiny lesson. It's a mixture of primary and secondary sources and there's even an option for the teacher to custom design her own hippocampus page for the students to really bring resources together in one place for students to use. There are suggestions for assignments and projects and historical footnotes with audio from real historical figures. It really brings history to life for those who just see it as useless and not relevant to today. To punctuate a lecture and a textbook chapter with pictures and audio of the people they are reading about could really make history come alive for some students.
This is one web site that I will want to use in the future.