New Features of the LOC’s By the People
By the People is a Library of Congress project that I’ve written about and featured in my Teaching History With Technology courses since 2018. On By the People teachers and students can contribute to crowd-sourcing transcriptions of thousands of primary source documents. Some of the collections that I’ve featured over the years have been campaigns […]
A Free Smithsonian Webinar Tomorrow
Some of my high school history students often took a while to understand the idea that just because a document is an old primary source it doesn’t automatically mean that source is infallible or even an accurate representation of events. They still needed to account for context and the potential for an author’s bias among […]
The WWII Rumor Project – An Activity in Learning Through Primary Sources
A handful of years ago the Library of Congress launched a crowd sourcing project called By the People. The purpose of the project is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are housed by and have been scanned by the Library of Congress. Over the years there have […]
A Good Source of U.S. History Lesson Starters
When I taught U.S. History one of my go-to methods for starting classroom conversations about a new topic or unit was to give my students an interesting image or a short primary source document to review and ask questions about. A great place to find those conversation starters is the National Archive’s Today’s Document website. […]
Add Comments to Word Docs to Spark Discussion
Last Monday I shared directions for using Google Drive to add comments to PDF and directions for using Formative to add questions into primary source documents. The idea in both cases is to use those tools to spark dicussion and inquiry when reading primary source documents with students. This can also be done by adding […]
Read and Transcribe Walt Whitman’s Notebooks and Diaries
A few years ago the Library of Congress launched a crowd sourcing project called Crowd. The purpose of the project is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are housed by and have been scanned by the Library of Congress. Over the years there have been collections […]
Good Sets of Primary Source Documents About the American Revolution and More
The Massachusetts Historical Society has a great website that hosts collections of primary sources related to the American Revolution, founding families of the United States, abolition, and the Civil War. Additionally, on the MHS site you’ll find recordings of webinars about many of the topics related to the collections of primary sources. Music of the […]
Return to Sender – Interactive Map of Postcards from WWI
Return to Sender provides an interesting way for students to find and read postcards sent to and from soldiers during World War I. Return to Sender is an interactive map on which students can see where postcards were sent in Europe during World War I. The postcards displayed through the map are part of the […]
DocsTeach Adds New Documents and Lessons About Suffrage
Earlier this week the Library of Congress launched a new crowdsourcing campaign to transcribe more than 20,000 primary source documents related to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. The LOC isn’t the only organization to make primary sources related to suffrage available online. DocsTeach, produced by the National Archives, has a Women’s Rights […]
A New Crowdsourcing Project from the Library of Congress
Last year the Library of Congress introduced a new online project called Crowd. The project invites teachers, students, and anyone interested in history to contribute to the transcription of primary source documents. The documents are arranged in thematic collections that the LOC calls “campaigns.” This week the Library of Congress added a new campaign to […]
Crowdsourcing Civil War Document Transcription
Last fall the Library of Congress launched a new online initiative called Crowd. As the name implies, it’s a crowdsourcing project that anyone who registers on the LOC Crowd site can participate in. All of the documents in the Crowd project are documents in the LOC’s collection that need to be transcribed. The latest collection […]
NowComment – A Good Tool for Hosting Online Discussions
NowComment is an interesting tool for creating online conversations centered around shared documents. While you could do something similar in Google Docs, NowComment was designed for hosting threaded discussions and works with a wide variety of document types including PDFs and Word files. NowComment lets you upload a document then create a discussion about the […]
Two Online Primary Source Document Activities for High School Students
Earlier this week the Library of Congress launched a new crowdsourcing project called Crowd. The project seeks volunteers to transcribe primary source documents that are available online through the Library of Congress. Crowd is similar to the Smithsonian’s Digital Volunteers program. Both programs provide an opportunity for high school students and some middle school students […]
A New LOC Online Collection – Theodore Roosevelt’s Papers
I have always found Theodore Roosevelt to be one of the most fascinating characters in U.S. History. That is why I was excited this morning when I saw an email from the Library of Congress announcing the online publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers. The LOC’s collection of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers is divided into sixteen sections. […]
New Artifact Collections Added to DocsTeach
DocsTeach is one of my go-to recommendations for anyone who teaches U.S. History at a middle school or high school level. The site offers a dozen tools that you can use to create interactive history lessons based on primary and secondary sources. To help you build those lessons DocsTeach provides thousands of primary and secondary […]
Discover Primary Sources by Browsing the World Digital Library Maps
The World Digital Library hosts more than 19,000 primary documents and images from dozens of libraries around the world. Hosted by the Library of Congress and sponsored in part by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the mission of the World Digital Library is to promote the study and understanding of cultures. The WDL can be searched by date, […]
Docs Teach Adds New Primary Sources About WWI
Docs Teach is a fantastic resource for US History teachers that I have shared many times over the years. I like it so much that I include it in my Teaching History With Technology course. Docs Teach provides teachers with access tools for creating online lessons based on collections of primary source documents. Docs Teach […]
Find the Features of Digital Vaults in DocsTeach
The U.S. National Archives used to have a great feature called the National Archives Digital Vaults. The Digital Vaults site offered great tools for teaching with primary sources from the National Archives. One of the aspects that I particularly liked was called “pathways challenges” which allowed students to see the connections between events and primary […]
