Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Scholastic's Interactive WWII Home Life Activity

Let me tell you how absolutely amazing Scholastic is. Here is the link to their WWII American Home Front Home Life interactive activity. The interactive activity lets students click on different items in the living room and kitchen of a home front WWII family home. The item links open to show primary sources including photos, posters, and more, and some play audio files such as Roosevelt's inauguration speech and public service announcements. Each primary source link also includes a brief description of each primary source and its significance to the war effort during WWII.

I had actually decided that Scholastic (and its website) is amazing a long time ago, but I love it even more now! You see, I actually found this activity a week or so ago, and the audio files would not work. I did everything I could to my computer - I cleared my cookies, I deleted history, restarted my computer, downloaded updates, made sure I had the latest versions of everything, downloaded some more, restarted my computer again...you get the drift.

I was so excited about the audio files because that was one kind of WWII resource that I really felt like I was lacking. I know I haven't posted any of the WWII stuff to the website yet, but there is a lot of stuff coming!

Anyway, the audio files still were not working after all of my troubleshooting, so I contacted Scholastic. They sent me an e-mail that let me know that they would be working on the problem. Not much later, they let me know that they had fixed the problem! I was so excited. I went straight to the website to try to listen to those audio files (and I realize you are smirking at my geekiness).

They still wouldn't work for me! Scholastic worked on their website for me for over a week so that those audio files would work! You and I, thanks to Scholastic, now have access to this completely working interactive WWII American Home Front Home Life activity!

Enjoy!