WhatWasThere: As a history buff and vintage photo lover, I appreciated the potential of WhatWasThere right away. Both an app and a site, WhatWasThere ties Google maps to historic photos, with the idea that visitors can see a historic street view along with a modern one. Once you click on a photo to select it, you can click to go to Google StreetView, where the photo you selected will be overlaid over the modern view. A slide bar allows you to fade the vintage photo in and out so you can simultaneously view both old and new.
What this could potentially mean in real time is that a visitor could stand on a city block (or search for it) and see photos of all the historic buildings that existed on that same spot. Alternatively, a class could research the history of a particular building as it was built and evolved over time. While it does take some age and experience to appreciate how cool this view of the past is, students might be excited to see what was there before their school building or the grocery store on the corner. It is a good way to get students interested in local history and to give them a sense of how time changes things.
The site currently has about 50,000 photos and is crowdsourced, meaning users are able to upload their own vintage photos with simple tags and labels. I tested the site by searching for Virginia Beach, VA (where I currently live), Ewing Township, NJ (where I grew up), and Chillicothe, OH (where my husband's father grew up). These are roughly in order of population, and I found photos for all three, with Chillicothe only having two photos thus far. Bigger cities obviously have more, but the site is growing all the time.
MyStorybook: This one is so fun and has instant appeal to children who want to create their own storybook. There are plenty of sites and software that do similar things, but MyStorybook is an excellent entry. It's free and quick to get started with no account needed unless you want to save your story. Accounts require an age range, email address, a username, and a password, but not a child's full name or any other details.
MyStorybook offers tutorials to help young students get started creating their storybook, but most will probably be able to dive right in. Teachers can easily provide structure to the creation process or let children's imaginations run wild. The characters and other pictures, backgrounds, etc. are numerous, flexible, bright, and colorful, and it is easy to add pages to your story. When you are done you can save it as an eBook and/or share it online.
Gooru: This site, unlike something like MyStorybook, requires a bit of a deep dive in order to fully engage with the site. To take a snorkel, you can browse the "collections" uploaded by contributors--basically, annotated web links with suggested lesson ideas, all curriculum-mapped to Common Core and/or other standards.
If you want to take the plunge, you can "remix" them into collections of your own. You can also upload your own content and create a "class" within the site to share the resources you have remixed or uploaded with your students. Digital analytics help you monitor whether your students have visited and successfully completed the module you create.
A few districts have adopted Gooru, at least experimentally, and like other sites such as Edmodo, it does seem like a district or school-wide adoption of Gooru might be a more effective use than one teacher using it alone. Gooru has potential to be very useful and has the backing of some impressive corporate and non-profit partners.
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