This website deals with the History of Jim Crow and has many valuable resources for teachers. The History and Geography sections of this website are quite rich in information and I think well-organized and easy to use. The website provides the in-depth essays and/or other materials to be used in the lessons. The American Literature section provides some interesting unit and lesson plans for well-known books such as A Raisin in the Sun and To Kill a Mockingbird. The Teacher Resources section provides a variety of lessons… some involve images, music, literature, simulations, etc. Quite a few seem to incorporate the PBS series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Overall, I am very impressed with this website. My favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird and I think the Unit on this book is interesting in the way they link it to an integrated literature/social studies unit on the case of the Scottsboro Boys and life in the 1930s.

I found this article about individual teachers selling their lesson plans online to be very interesting. Over the past few years, many teachers have started selling their lesson plans online rather than just sharing them on free websites. One teacher has earned $36,000 in a year selling lesson plans. This trend has caused some school districts to question the idea of who owns material developed for public school classrooms and whether or not school districts should share some of the profits. Others worry that selling the lesson plans harms the idea of free swapping and sharing. But, some teachers argue that it validates their efforts and shows that people recognize their hard work and expertise. Whether using free or bought lessons from online, I did find the teachers who argued that they enjoy comparing their lessons and getting ideas to be very compelling.

While not located in the DC area, the Tenement Museum in New York City has a great website. You can dowload primary sources and other great resources. Navigating from this page is helpful.

Obama gave a speach on Wednesday to talk about the Race to the Top competition - a competition in which states compete for $4.35 billion in education grant money.

This article provides a great hisory of something in our own backyard here in DC - Arlington National Cemetery and its history in the Washington family and as the home of Robert E. Lee. Studying this could be a way to link the Civil War to the area.

This website contains a great list of Historic Sites in DC - for example, I have bookmarked the page for the Old Stone House in Georgetown. If you select, "List of Sites" - you will be taken to a listing by neighborhoods of other historic sites in the DC area. This could allow you to search for places near your school that could be a great resource to incorporate into your lessons. Many, including the Old Stone House, offer tours throughout the day. The Old Stone House is also staffed by well-informed Park Rangers who are eager to share their knowledge.

When Arne Duncan presided over Chicago public schools, he closed failings schools. Recent studies show that this did not actually help the students at those schools.

Story Corps is an amazing nonprofit project - the goal is to record people's stories and copies are then placed in the Library of Congress. When I worked at the Phillips Collection, StoryCorps came and recorded stories that related to migration because of the Jacob Lawrence Migration Series Exhibition. The stories were very powerful and you could see they way younger generations really responded to hearing the stories of both their own families and strangers. It made the experiences seem so real and connected them to real people.

While I am not sure of the best way to highlight different pages of this website to suit the format of Diigo, I think this could be a really helpful website. The "Volumes" link takes the viewer to a section where you can go through the volumes page by page. These writings are a great primary source/document to bring into the classroom.... so much more exciting to read the real thing than just see a mention of it in a text book.

I think this is a great story about an individual who gave up a successful legal career to become a teacher. It caught my attention because the teacher with whom I am doing my practicum placement left a career at the State Department to become a teacher for some similar reasons.

I thought this was an interesting article. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently gave a speach in which he criticized current teacher training programs.

The Harlem Success Academny takes its students on field trips that aim to help students do better on standardized tests by taking them on fields trips to introduce them to subject matter that will be on the test, such as a farm.

In light of all the recent discussions about DC schools and dropout rates, I found this article to be particularly relevant and upsetting. According to the study, about 1 in 10 male high school dropouts is in jail or juvenile detention (compared with 1 in 35 high school graduates).

Chapter 7 of Takaki briefly mentioned the fabled King Ranch in Texas which led me to check out their website. It provides a history of the ranch and its various industries. This page is about the Kinenos....and provides an interesting look at their history on the ranch.

This article caught my attention because my practicum placement cooperating teacher has a bulletin board and he encourages students to bring in newspaper articles that catch their attention. However, he has said that he hopes that they will not all be about sports stars and entertainers. Yet, the students are constantly talking about entertainers (especially Lil Wayne - he's all the rage in middle schools apparently!) and sports starts. I feel like a story like this could be used to help inspire the students to stay in school - seeing people they admire commit to their education could be very valuable.

The format of this website has changed a bit since I first learned of it over the summer. I don't think it is quite as user friendly as it used to be. However, it does provide some great primary documents for teachers to use when teaching certain moments.... in this case, the lesson I chose was Rosa Parks. By using some of these documents, students can become exposed to a more nuanced interpretation of the bus boycott and the events leading up to it.

I happened to see this clip on TV this morning while having my cereal and getting ready to head off to my practicum placement. In it, Rhee addresses the security issues and says that the security company "went under" and that is why police were called in. This was a big topic among my teachers today at school.... they feel that the story about the security company "going under" is false and are pretty angry that they had NO security last Friday and that teachers had to take turns outside the school acting as security.

Winterthur (in Delaware) is the former country estate of Henry Francis duPont. He was one of the first avid collectors of American fine and decorative arts and the museum (aside from being a beautiful place to visit) is now a leading center for scholarship in the field. The museum has created packets of primary-source materials that can be used in classrooms if a field trip is not possible.

I thought this might be interesting to share in light of what is happening with DCPS. Yesterday was my first day at my practicum placement and during lunch a few teachers were talking about the "buzz on the blogs" and the firings. All of them mentioned the students protestes by the students at the Duke Ellington School.

This article provides a look at a bill that proposes to raise the quality of early learning and care programs that serve children from brith through age 5.