Over the last couple of years, NARA has given us tons of fun goodies – the very cool Digital Vaults, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, RSS feeds, a YouTube channel and wikis. Together with their excellent lesson plans and digitized documents, the National Archives site is a no-brainer for Social Studies and History teachers.
But I really love their latest project.
Called DocsTeach, the project is designed to provide useful document-based lesson plans and activities created by both NARA staff members and classroom teachers.
The process is simple. Create an free account and you’re in. Once you are logged in, you can
- Create “classrooms” for each of your actual classes
- Find activities and primary documents from over 3000 already in the database
- Save your activities and documents by “starring” your favorites
- Add your newly discovered activities and documents to each of your digital classrooms
- Create your own online activities that focus on a wide variety of historical thinking skills with the cool Activity Creator
- Share the URL for each of your digital classrooms with actual students
- Facilitate the cool Flash-driven teaching activities in your face-to-face class
DocsTeach truly is almost too cool and useful for words. You need to spend some time over there playing with the tool. This is the sort of 21st century tool that we need to be using as a part of our instruction.
The NARA staff has done a great job of focusing on high level thinking skills with a focus on content-specific activities such as:
- Finding a Sequence
- Focusing on Details
- Interpreting Data
- Making Connections
- Mapping History
- Seeing the Big Picture
- Weighing the Evidence
I also like the idea that the database of activities will continue to grow as teachers create, publish and share their ideas. DocsTeach is an excellent addition to the National Archives stable of useful tools. Let me know what you think!
