Short Lessons on Rome and Life as a Roman Teenager

National Geographic has a great series of YouTube videos called National Geographic 101 which include videos like Ancient Rome 101. The video provides an excellent introduction to the origin, rise, and fall of the Roman Empire. The length and substance of the video makes it an ideal candidate for inclusion in an EDpuzzle lesson.


TED-Ed has a good lesson that you can use as a follow-up to Ancient Rome 101. A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome is a TED-Ed lesson developed by Ray Laurence from the University of Kent. The video and its associated questions feature the story of seventeen year old Lucius Popidius Secundus.

An Interactive Map of the Roman Empire

A few years ago I wrote about a must-bookmark resource from Stanford University for history teachers and students. That resource is called ORBIS and it has been updated since the last time that I wrote about it. ORBIS is Stanford University's Geospatial Network Model of the Roman Empire. 

On ORBIS students can calculate the distance and travel times between hundreds of settlements in the Roman Empire. The calculations happen according to the modes of travel that would have been used during the time of the Roman Empire's greatest height. For example, I calculated the time and cost to travel by foot, wagon, and boat between Roma and Londonium in the summer and winter. The calculations include the cost of feeding donkeys along the way. 

In this new video I provide an introduction to using ORBIS. 

Applications for Education
While you could certainly have students use Google Earth to map distances between settlements in the Roman Empire, ORBIS is a step above that because students can calculate travel times and distances according the modes of transportation that were available during the Roman Empire.

Ancient Rome 101 and Life as a Roman Teenager

National Geographic has a great series of YouTube videos called National Geographic 101. The most recent addition to that series is Ancient Rome 101. The video provides an excellent introduction to the origin, rise, and fall of the Roman Empire. The length and substance of the video makes it an ideal candidate for inclusion in an EDpuzzle lesson.


TED-Ed has a good lesson that you can use as a follow-up to Ancient Rome 101. A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome is a TED-Ed lesson developed by Ray Laurence from the University of Kent. The video and its associated questions feature the story of seventeen year old Lucius Popidius Secundus.

Adobe's Project ROME Looks Promising

Last Monday I bookmarked an article on ZDNet about Adobe's new Project ROME for Education to read later. I now wish I hadn't waited. After trying it out for the better part of an hour, I can describe Project ROME as a combination of the best elements of Glogster, Apple's Pages, Keynote, and touch of GIMP thrown-in for good measure.

Project ROME allows users to create multimedia documents and presentations. ROME can also be used to create quizzes and to design websites. Users can build documents that include images, videos, and animations. Animations can be imported from an existing file or created from scratch within ROME.  Resizing of elements within any project in ROME is a simple matter of drag and drop resizing. Arranging elements is also a drag and drop process. Adding elements to a project in ROME is done by selecting from a large series of drop-down menus. Some parts of using ROME are quite intuitive, but as you might expect with a program that has many features, there are parts of ROME that will require you to follow a tutorial the first time you try it. Watch the video below for an overview of Project ROME.



Right now Project ROME is free, but I don't expect it to stay free forever. ROME is available to use online and as a desktop application.

Applications for Education
As the demo template shows, Project ROME could be used to create mathematics quizzes that contain animations. You could also use ROME to create a quiz or set of discussion prompts that contain videos. ROME could be used by students to create multimedia presentations or documents.

Great Open Course from Yale - Roman Architecture

Through Open Culture I've learned of another free open course from Yale. Roman Architecture 252 is, as the name implies, a course on Roman Architecture. The course has twenty-three lectures which you can download or watch on YouTube. The course appears to cover more than just architecture as the lecture titles mention murals, art, civic life, and lifestyles of the rich and famous. Embedded below is the second lecture in the course, The Founding of Rome and the Beginnings of Urbanism in Italy.


Applications for Education
This course from Yale is a just another great example of the excellent free learning opportunities that the web makes available to learners. I wouldn't play one of these videos for an entire class period, but I might show a segment from one. I also wouldn't hesitate to recommend a course like this to a high school student that had a deep interest in learning more than a typical high school curriculum covers.

Perseus Digital Library - History of the Greco Roman World

The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University has been in development for more than twenty years. The mission of the Perseus Digital Library is to make the full record of humanity accessible to everyone. The focus of the library is on the history of the Greco-Roman World . The library also contains artifacts about 19th Century United States, the Renaissance, and Arabic language.

Browsing the library could be a very time-consuming process. Fortunately, the Perseus Digital Library offers a variety of search tools including a option to search within documents.

Applications for Education
The Perseus Digital Library is an extensive collection of documents and artifacts that history students can access. The layout of the website and the depth of the content makes the Perseus Digital Library best reserved for use in a high school or college setting.

Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
Calendars Through the Ages and Around the World
The World Digital Library
History Links You Might Have Missed

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