Social Studies Online Community

Since joining this community back in February, I have felt in the loop as far as current thinking on trends and ideas about the teaching of K-12 and university level social studies worldwide. I have learned mostly about lesson planning and dealing with classroom problems and issues.
All of the sources of information that I use currently, including Zinn Education Foundation, Democracy Now Teach and Get Involved, Teachers Domain, The People Speak, The New Press, Week in Rap, and many others I got from this online community. From most of these sites I find information on the parts of history that get little attention in most history classes, and these are the areas of history that I am interested in learning about and teaching about. A few of these sources are for current events and news media. These news sources have come in very valuable, because every Monday we discuss current events from all different perspectives.
To find these sources, all I had to do was ask if anyone resources connected with Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of United States, and people began firing back with links. Then from each one of these links you can find a plethora of other similar sites with similar information.
One time I was frustrated because I felt my students just didn’t listen to me especially when I was trying to give a lecture or explain directions. So I asked, what do you do to get kids to listen??? Some interesting stories came back. One that I want to highlight talked about what he does in his classroom to get students to listen better. He bought a few comfortable chairs, not expensive ones but much more comfortable than the regular student chairs. He then set up a policy in his classroom that whoever could repeat his directions verbatim to the other students who were not listening, so that he did not have to repeat himself as much, would get to sit in the comfortable chair the following day. All of the sudden students began listening more intently to see if they could win the comfortable seat. It got to a point though where he didn’t have enough seats to accommodate those students who could repeat his directions verbatim. But, I figured that is a much better problem than where he started off.
In my own classroom one day, I may try such a strategy.