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From the website: History Matters is "a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning of the City University of New York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Visible Knowledge Project. . . . Designed for high school and college teachers and students of U.S. history survey courses, this site serves as a gateway to web resources and offers unique teaching materials, first-person primary documents, and guides to analyzing historical evidence. We emphasize materials that focus on the lives of ordinary Americans and actively involve students in analyzing and interpreting evidence."

Well, it looks like a student in this group shared this in the past, but what a great website! I'll put up some more sticky notes. This website features a large number of primary source material of different media and is strong in its content. Beyond that, this site features information about the methods historians use (interesting to high school students, applicable to college students), a database of reviewed websites, lesson plans, syllabi, and teaching tips. A pretty comprehensive resource.

Paul Weinstein wrote this article primarily geared towards undergraduate history professors, and how they might use film in their classroom. However, much of this is still applicable for us as secondary social studies teachers. In particular, his Appendix B has a sort of study guide he provides for each of his students at the beginning of the semester to get them thinking about how to analyze film for its historical perspective.

Because political cartoons are somewhat of special category of primary source images, I thought it would behoove us to find a particular strategy for analyzing and interpreting them - much along the same lines as the SOAPS method but one specifically designed for political cartoons. This lesson plan, and its "Cartoon Analysis Checklist" is a start.

Thanks for this add, I can use this for my lesson plan on Chinese immigration.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is significantly more than just a museum and it is arguably the most thorough site on the Holocaust as well as other acts of genocide. Just reviewing the website and all that it offers can take several hours. Through the education filter, teachers can find complete information on how to teach the Holocaust or other acts of genocide. For example, the site offers online lessons, teacher workshops, essential topics, teaching resources, lesson plans, activities, and a list of common student questions. USHMM site suggests 5 guidelines for teaching the Holocaust, which include defining genocide, investigating the context and dynamics that led to genocide, understanding parallels to other genocides and analyzing American and world responses. A function that I find very useful and interesting is the "Mapping Initiative" filter where one can learn how to use Google Earth to view a Darfur Layer file. This file provides comparisons of before and after views of villages impacted by the ongoing events in Darfur. There is also a section of photographs, videos, and testimonies. In addition the USHMM maintains an archive consisting of wide variety of documents including photographs and films. Lastly, if field trips are a possibility, admission is free and there is a special children's exhibit called Remember the Children: Daniel's Story.

This website is provided by PBS for teachers to use to help with different classroom applications. It offers teachers the ability get classroom resources, start discussion boards with other educators, and professional development tools. 

This website, while providing a fairly detailed summary of The Reconstruction, I have bookmarked because of the images it contains. I think pictures and images are a useful tool in shaping students perceptions of history; as Erin evidenced in her last lesson plan, providing students with a model for critically examining images could prove very beneficial to building on their critical thinking abilities.

The Television News Archive is a database of nightly news broadcasts in the US from 1968. American University subscribes to the database, and it can be accessed through the library's website. At the news archive, you can search the database of nightly news programs for a specific date or topic. Then, you can watch many of these streaming videos online.

The Perry-Castaneda Map Collection at the University of Texas-Austin has a great selection of online maps. They have modern political maps, historical maps, maps about history, regional maps, thematic maps (population, climate, energy, ethnic, religious). Many of the maps have large PDF formats that are of great quality and detail.

This is sort of a basic review of how and why we as teachers might use film in the classroom. This is my first post on this issue; I am searching for some more in-depth sites that might have models for lesson plans. Many sites have lesson plans based around a specific film; a site that provides lesson plan templates that are applicable across a wide variety of films would be more applicable/useful. However, the comments made here by Paris provide a good base from which to start thinking about the idea.

This next post connects back to the lesson plan on interpreting political cartoons. This website - published through the Library of Congress - is nothing short of fantastic. Herbert Block's career covers an incredible span of the 20th century. Using this website as a resource, you can find insightful political cartoons of almost any event from the Great Depression to the Clinton era.

From the website: "The Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools is a coalition of over forty partner organizations working to improve civic education in America's schools. The Campaign's goal is to increase and improve civic learning in grades K-12 by working for policies that implement the recommendations of the Civic Mission of Schools report. This includes efforts to bring about changes in national, state, and local education policy."

They also have civic lesson plans under resources and a toolkit for advocating for the civic mission of schools which I, personally, think is critically important in this age of education for economy, and such.