Social Studies

Just another site where teachers can share their lessons with one another.

Tags? How might teachers use the site?

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.

This site gives human rights reports listed by country and year. It is an excellent resource for information on human rights conditions throughout the world.

How might teachers use the site?

This website has many resources for teachers that range from curriculums, to lesson plans, to videos. It is free to become a member and many of the teaching resources are aligned with state and national standards.

Speakers for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War from Organization of American Historians

Political impact of lack of history education. Great way to explain to students why history matters. Focus on historical thinking!

It seems that modern education has been guided by discipline-based curricula, with each subject separate and divided. This is probably a reflection of specialization and the division of labor of the culture. But why? Can't we have some math and science in an english class? or history class? This is pretty exciting stuff, but also pretty controversial.

This section of the National Council for the Social Studies website appears to be a little bit dated, but the materials that are presented seem to be a useful resource. It must be difficult for social studies teachers to tackle the tough subjects of current global conflict, terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq, and September 11, 2001. I am sure many school districts are still using textbooks that were printed prior to 2001 or 2002, and just don't cover this relevant information. Some of the items listed on this page are basic and practical (maps, etc.) and others are a bit more engaging and dynamic, aiming to help students develop an emotional connection to the subject matter.

How might teachers use what's there, even if it is dated?

Global issues classes in high schools will probably cover this subject matter; mine did in-depth. Some of the resources could be useful as hand outs, especially the maps. As an example, maybe over the course of a week or so of instruction, a teacher using this site as a resource could put together a lesson that stretches over the 5 class meetings, chronologically examining the roots of the second War in Iraq, stemming from the Persian-Gulf war, through Clinton's involvement, to 9/11, terrorism, Al-Qaeda being used as a pretext for war, concluding with an examination of the anti-war movement and the short course of the "traditional" war against the Iraqi military. The following week could move in to the insurgency or another related topic. Basically, I see this website as a place where a teacher looking to present the outlined events can find some extra resources that won't be in most textbooks.

Michelle Lee, a middle school teacher in Michigan, wrote this interdisciplinary lesson plan for teaching the American Revolution. There are some great ideas for incorporating geography, math, sociology, language arts, phys ed, and music into the social studies/history classroom. -----------Once you click the link, hit the full text button on the right hand side.-----------

So this site has a survey that students from different countries around the world have taken about citizenship. You can sign up for free as a teacher and there are two different projects. 1. Survey - See what your students think are the most important responsibilities of citizenship and how they compare to students in other places around the world. There is also a reflective essay assignment for students if you like. 2. Memory Bank - Students record stories of civic engagement from around their own neighborhoods and upload them to the site. Currently there are none up. But yours could be the first!

I was frustrated by my inability to find primary source documents on my last mini-lesson for the Conscription Act; however I was happy to stumble upon these in regards to this week's Takaki reading. PBS already provides a great wealth of resources to teachers - including lesson plans - and I couldn't resist posting this one. The rest of the site includes other primary source documents as well as images, all broken down over periods that correlate to episodes from their "The West" series.

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.

This history channel website gives online history games (I think this could act as a fun homework assignment to reinforce a lesson already given, or to get kids excite about a unit.)

Defining citizenship eduction in a global society is an increasingly relevant and important education issue today. This site has really great resources for exploring global citizenship. In particular, I liked the global citizenship chart, it is easy to read and it defines key elements by age level. There is also an entire page of related links that could provide further explanation.

Dude this is rad. I hadn't seen this before but just searched for citizenship and it came up. Thanks for posting!

Civics program, interactive simulation. Paid accounts. 

I'm not certain this hasn't already been posted; I did a search in our groups and didn't see it. iLearn Technology is an interesting and useful blog, where people post descriptions and links to other tech-savvy web sites and applications that can be a great resource to teachers. Though most of the sites I have looked at would probably be aimed more towards K-6 classrooms, others extend at least into middle school. Much like our diigo, each post is tagged with keywords so that you may search their site by subject or category.

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.