Middle School Social Studies

History podcasts, history courses that are podcast, history podcast directories and history magazines that are podcast

This post is regularly updated. It gives a list of History podcasts with the accompanying thoughts I have about them.

On this page, you can share your experiences and opinions about the new curriculum materials, ACT, ANALYZE, ACT: A BLUEPRINT FOR 21st CENTURY CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, developed by PBS Teachers and the Media Education Lab. Your feedback and reflections on the lesson plans, videos and interactive quiz will help us improve our curriculum.

Take the Let's Get Political Quiz to learn about the various components that make up our political personalities and to measure your own style of civic engagement.

Discover the Stories of New Americans The New Americans Web site offers an educational adventure for students in grades 7-12. The site supplements the PBS documentary series, which explores the immigrant experience through personal stories. Interactive sections of the site allow students to explore the immigration experience through a timeline, maps and activities in tracking family history and examining the effect of immigration on the nation. Eleven lesson plans involve students in activities such as analyzing factual data or conducting oral histories of first- or second-generation immigrants. For workplaces, schools and community organizations that would like to use shorter stories from The New Americans to increase understanding of recent immigrants, Active Voice and Kartemquin Films offer three brief, themed Video/DVD Modules and Discussion Guides for a nominal fee.

Get Students Involved in the Election Process The producers of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer are preparing the.Vote and the.Gov-a series of eleven 4- to 5-minute reports on the 2008 campaign leading to the inauguration of the next president. After Election Day, the series will evolve from the.Vote to the.Gov and look at the process of forming a new government, identifying key issues for the new administration and new Congress. The video segments, hosted by the.News journalists, will be provided free to middle school and high school teachers and their students throughout the fall campaign. Each segment of the.Vote and the.Gov is accompanied by online, standards-based activities that will give students the opportunity to create multimedia works: you.Edit allows students to rework and re-edit video material provided by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, and you.Report serves as a home for student-generated content (students' perspectives on policy issues and the election process). All segments will be closed captioned. An initial the.Vote report has been posted online, allowing educators to become familiar with the.Vote and the educational opportunities it provides. Regular production will begin in September and run up to the inauguration in January 2009.

Spark Students' Political Imagination SimCity, part C-Span, President Forever 2008 + Primaries puts the fate of the nation in your students' hands. Are they ready to become the most powerful political leader in the world? Encourage them to prove they can succeed in this political game. Their campaign will be successful through writing speeches, running ads (including attack ads on their opponent) and holding a rally. The 2008 election or past elections can be simulated, with multiple players or a single player running against the computer.

A gathering place of primary-source information. Sources held in archives, which document so much important first-hand information, are often not searchable by popular search engines. One needs to search within those institutional sites directly, using specific search phrases not readily discernible to non-scholars. The experience can be frustrating, resulting in researchers leaving sites without finding needed information. AwesomeStories is about primary sources. The stories exist as a way to place original materials in context and to hold those links together in an interesting, cohesive way (thereby encouraging people to look at them). It is a totally different kind of web site in that its purpose is to place primary sources at the forefront - not the opinions of a writer. Its objective is to take a site's users to places where those primary sources are found, and to which the site's users may otherwise not go. The author of each story is listed on the "chapters" page of the story. A link to the author provides more detailed information.

New technology on the Internet-from geographic-information systems (or GIS) to create-your-own-map programs-is allowing teachers to tap into students' own interests and show them that geography is much more than filling in country names on a photocopied map. "It brings them into the world community," Cunha says. "It makes the flat map come alive."

As the Internet has evolved into a major source of information for students researching history and social studies, it also has become a place where hidden agendas and false information can trip up both students new to a topic and teachers searching for credible sources of historical data.

Free online guide maps digital-age skills to social studies projects and tasks

Look at Web sites as they appeared in the past. Enter the URL and select the date.