photo credit: ckaroli

Good morning everyone!

Looking for a way to spice up your social studies or history class? Check this out! Way back in July, Richard Byrne blogged about this site: “Playing History.” I loved it and tagged it, knowing I’d want to share it here. Finally had a chance to check it out, and yep – it’s worth a closer look!

Basically, http://playinghistory.org/ is a site that aggregates games about history as submitted by people all over the web. A tag cloud is featured prominently as a the main interface for locating games but you can also search. Here’s a shot of the American History collection:

A handy rating system allows you to quickly see which of these games were popular (or not).  Then you are only two mouse clicks away from the actual game, located somewhere on the Internet. Drilling into the listing yields a detail page with lots of helpful information:

Quality of the games can vary widely, however. I started playing “Do I Have a Right?” and couldn’t stop! It was terrific! A few others I clicked on were more like interactive websites than games, but, it’s easy to make those determinations.

I like this site because it’s easy to use and helps you locate engaging activities tied to your curriculum. And, of course, the site itself and the games located are free!

Hope this helps!

-kj-