Here are the newest additions to The Best Sites To Learn About The Gulf Oil Spill:

The Washington Post has a slideshow showing protest signs against BP.

Drilling The Relief Well is a TIME Magazine slideshow.

As Arizona immigration law looms, local tensions mount is the title of a Washington Post slideshow on the law.

I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About Arizona’s New Immigration Law.

Here are today’s additions to The Best Sites To Learn About The Gulf Oil Spill:

Gulf of Mexico oil spill: BP’s great asset sale is an interactive from The Guardian.

What BP Could Have Bought With All the Money They Lost is an infographic.

Oil spill in Dalian, China is a slideshow from The Big Picture about another new oil spill.

Slate has an interactive animation looking at various scenarios for future movement of the spill.

My Story, My Goal is a very impressive multimedia presentation. Here is how they describe themselves:

Fourteen University of Miami multimedia graduate students teamed with students from seven Knight Center for International Media partner schools in Africa and Asia to tell stories that attempt to personalize the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Working with Tom Kennedy, Knight Center Professional-in-Residence, each team found personal local stories that shed light and insight on critical global issues, including poverty, maternal health, environmental sustainability, universal education, gender equality, HIV AIDS and children’s health.

Though the audio might be challenging for English Language Learners (too bad the videos don’t have closed-captioning), it’s really an extraordinary production. Viewers can also leave comments, which is a great writing opportunity for students.

You can read more about the effort at Innovative Interactivity.

Larry Cuban has just published a very useful and thought-provoking post titled How History Is Taught In Schools.

In it, among other points, he contrasts “heritage” pedagogy (“cultivating a national identity, patriotism, and a faith in one’s nation”) with “historical” pedagogy (“not a single account of the past but many accounts”). He continues:

History is an interpretation of the past, not a fax that yesteryear has wired to the present.

This is a very shortened version of his description, and I’d encourage you to read his whole post.

It’s an interesting way of looking at it, one that I’ll certainly be raising in my International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class.