Group items tagged

I heard about this site when I saw Pam Berger at the Heartland School Library Conference this summer. This sites lets you design your own interactive primary source activity. You can create digital movies, comic strips and rebus stories. Teachers can create and manage activities for a class. The site is simple enough that students (or student groups) could even create their own activities to present to their class. The site also operates completely online and requires no downloads.

This website from the Immigration History Research Center and the University of Minnesota has collections of digitized letters written by immigrants and to immigrants. It contains original images of the letters as well as translations, since most letters are in languages other than English. This website allows students a first person perspective of the challenges faced by immigrants to the U.S.

This site is presented by the Virginia Center for Digital History and the University of Virginia Library. It showcases two communities during the Civil War. One count was in the north, and one was in the south. It provides an interesting case study of life on both sides of the war. Students and teachers can use this site to compare maps, letters, diaries, newspaper articles, speeches and records in both communities. It also organizes the war into three eras: the eve of war, the war years, and the aftermath.

The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment."

This is a site which gives various manuscripts from 1775 - present. It is easy to navigate. From the essays is a link to the digital reproduction of the manuscript. Great site for a social studies teacher.

This is the official site for the Ken Burns series on National Parks. Here you can watch clips of the series. There are sections on the history of national parks and the people often associated with the parks. There are lesson plans for upper grades for various episodes. There are also learning modules for digital story telling that I found very interesting.

This site is part of the Eisenhower Presidential Library. It would be extremely useful for civil rights units. This is a nice collection of some of Eisenhower's most important correspondence during the Little Rock High School integration crisis. It is also neat to read them because they are scans of the actual typed documents and not just transcriptions. It seems more authentic when students can see the real thing. His notes, diaries, telegrams, letters and press releases really help to show how Eisenhower handled the situation. (Note: There is even an exchange of letters between Jackie Robinson and the president in which they discuss how blacks need to be patient for civil rights)

Easy to navigate. Primary sources include court cases, historic newspapers, landmark document, and social history. Uses drop down for topic selection. Also includes lesson plans, multimedia, science and technology.

The National Archives' digital classroom for using primary sources. Activities and training for students and teachers. Link to another site for using primary sources, Docs Teach.

The exhibits on this site were awesome! From the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence to the Deadly Influenza Virus or Electing a President and Democracy; these were just a few among many that met indicators on my specific grade level, so I'm sure others would work for different elementary grades. My favorite part was the Eyewitness exhibit. It has links to all important moments in US History and has video, songs, and voice recordings to bring students into that very moment in time.

The University of Iowa Archives have put online scans of Civil War diaries, including soldiers held at Andersonville Prison, with full transcriptions to make sense of that 1800s penmanship.

This site gives an explanation of primary resources along with many reputable links to websites that have primary documents. Additional information about using subject directories and search engines will make searching for primary documents a little easier.

This site has over 600 primary source documents from the time of Christopher Columbus to the Civil War. This would connect with 5th grade curriculum about the American Revolution and Native Americans. This would be a great resource to introduce to teachers and students.

This is an amazing site with hundreds of annotated American political documents.  There are items written by Christopher Columbus, Cotton Mather, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and William Bradford.  This site would be very useful to a classroom teacher to show the actual documents that are discussed in a textbook. 

This site has many primary documents throughout our history. There are 362 searchable primary document collections. As I looked through this site, it seemed to have a lot of photos throughout history. It would be a valuable resource to any multimedia project in the media center.

This site includes digital photographs, sheet music and background information on artifacts. Researchers can locate primary sources by topic, such as African American, Asian Americans, Civil War, Native Americans, just to name a few. Photos can be enlarged and pdf sheet music can be printed. Great resource for history, art, and literature.

A richly interactive site where visitors can design and create varied genres of art. A virtual tour through the NGA has an accompanying guide in 5 languages. Extensive information on artists from all eras. Lots of activities at the teacher's site. A good instructional site. Grades 3-12.

This art site allows children to explore American Folk art, landscapes, abstract art, still life, and digital photography. Children are able to manipulate art to create their own pieces. Students can also create a tropical jungle. There are additional online resources for teachers, as well as a link to exhibits from the National Art Gallery.

This page contains several art activities for children, including interactive art programs that allow students to create portraits or still life pictures. There is a link that allows students to search for specific artists or works. This site would be a good resource for art teachers, but English teachers could also use it to find different works of art that appeal to kids and could be used for descriptive writing assignments.

This one I am tagging partly for the sake of how entertaining it is. There really are vintage commercials here and you can watch them start to finish. I think these would be applicable in the classroom when talking about how advertising works, etc. or when talking about social culture and how it's changed over time.

This is a site that has primary sources that relate to Greek history. My eye was drawn to this because 6th graders study Greek history and I've noticed that students of all ages seem to be very fascinated by it. I think what this website has would be very meaningful if enough was known about the primary sources being shared. In other words, what I saw that is available here isn't engaging all by itself, but if something was being talked about in a history book or in a piece of literature, then it would be cool to make the connection with a primary source here.