Tip of the Week: Personalized PD with the LOC

Complete the following sentence in your head.

Every workshop I attend should . . .

My first thought?

include snacks and very large Diet Pepsi.

But I suppose there are a few other ways to complete the sentence. A couple of weeks ago I ran across a very interesting post by Pernille Ripp titled Every Workshop I Attend Should . . . What Attendees Wish We Knew. Powerful stuff. As someone who spends a lot of time working with teachers, it was a great reminder of what a good PD session should look like.

• Teachers want choice
• They want to connect with others and content
• They want to be acknowledged as experts
• They want practical ideas
• They want to be inspired
• They want the focus to be on students
• They want it to be fun

And I’m a big believer in face to face, professional learning in groups. I love the interaction that can happen when teachers passionate about the profession get together. Using Ripp’s list as a guide is a wonderful way to measure whether the learning is of high quality.

But with this new fangled interwebs thing out there, there is also personal professional growth opportunities available that would have been impossible to find even five years ago. So where can you find professional development options that contain all of the things on Ripp’s list?

TPS Journal: Hidden Jewel at the LOC

The Library of Congress has always been a go-to for social studies teachers. Lesson plans. Primary sources. Maps. Analysis worksheets. Social media tools. I’m sure it’s already in most of your teacher toolkits and you visit often.

But I’ve also discovered that many classroom teachers aren’t always aware of some of the other goodies buried on the LOC website.

One of my favorites is the TPS, Teaching with Primary Sources, section. And the best part of the TPS section is

Free Library of Congress eBooks for students

As more and more schools are moving away from paper textbooks and materials, teachers are working to answer the obvious question:

where can I find digital resources appropriate for kids?

If you and your building are using Mac computers or IOS devices such as iPads or iPods, at least part of the answer is the Library of Congress. The folks over there recently released six free iBooks that can be quickly downloaded and are perfect for having students interact with primary source evidence.

The Student Discovery Sets bring together historical artifacts and one-of-a-kind documents on a wide range of topics, from history to science to literature. Based on the Library’s Primary Source Sets, these new iBooks have built-in interactive tools that let students zoom in, draw to highlight details, and conduct open-ended primary source analysis.

(Aren’t an Apple school? The LOC is still an awesome place to find online and digital resources.)

The six books,

Tip of the Week: Primary sources writing prompts aligned to Bloom’s Taxonomy

If you haven’t spent at least a few hours at the TPS-Barat blog site, you’re missing out. They’ve got some amazing resources designed specifically to support hisitorical thinking. Using funds and support from the Library of Congress, the Barat Educational Foundation created a site focused on the effective use of primary sources in the classroom. Titled TPS-Barat Primary Source Nexus, the site has themed sets of primary sources, teaching strategies, online and face to face professional development, and tech integration tips.

Seriously. Be prepared to spend some time there. Plus you knows it’s all good cause the LOC is involved.

I recently ran across a little bit of their goodness that seems like a no-brainer.  As we shift our instructional focus to include more historical thinking process and literacy, using primary and secondary sources should be one of our prime strategies. But it can be difficult integrating the use of primary source images with literacy activities.

The good news?

TPS-Barat has got you covered. They’ve developed a whole series of writing prompts aligned to Bloom’s Taxonomy that are designed for use with images and photos.

Chronicling America – 1000s of historical newspapers

Are you kidding me? Seriously?

Thousands of historical newspapers from all over the country? Yup. And over 7,892,470 actual newspaper pages? Let that sink in for just a moment. Yup. But where, you ask, can I find such an incredible research tool? The very useful Chronicling America site from the Library of Congress, of course.

You’d think I’d be happy with almost eight million pages to play with. I mean, it’s 7,892,470 pages. Which is . . . you know, a lot. The 7,892,470+ pages cover newspapers from almost all 50 states and the District of Columbia from 1836 to 1922.

But once you get in the collection, it’s easy to get a little greedy. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some coverage from the Civil War? The Great Depression? Prohibition? WWII? Vietnam? Hippies? 9/11?

Still . . . 

25 ways to use the Library of Congress

I wish I would have thought of this.

I have written about the Library of Congress before. If you know me at all, you know that I love the LOC. You also know that it is an awesome place for you to find incredible resources and lesson plans.

But I have never really put all of the Library of Congress greatness together in one place.

Edudemic has.

Both of us know that so many great resources can be a bit overwhelming. And that it may be difficult for teachers to make sense of how to best use it all.

So . . .