Hi there Middle School Social Studies folks! This post is (mostly) for you. I have been thinking a lot about a quote I read, "School librarians must rethink their own existing workflows for curating resources, updating online spaces, and designing instruction." (Boyer, 2016) This led me to brainstorm ways for us to collaborate here and online with your students. I want to share new (and new to me) digital and technological resources that will aid you and me in teaching in this evolved classroom. So I will be rolling out websites and apps as I discover them. Please let me know if there is something specific you are looking for.
If you find yourself itching to include primary sources in your lessons, I have found a great resource for you. It's called Case Maker. There are 20 pre-made online challenges for your class already created, or you can create your own challenge using Library of Congress primary source documents.
Subjects range from Brown v. Board of Education to What are the Limits of the President's Power? There are so many interesting topics from which to choose:
Students have to work through a challenge question by examining primary sources such as newspaper articles, videos, and political cartoons and saving evidence to their casebooks. When they’re done, their work can be directly presented from the website or used as reference material for an offline assignment, like a paper or debate.
"With the ever increasing incorporation of technology tools in schools, the role of school librarians added technology integrationist to the role of information specialist." (Wine, 209) With this said, I always want to keep my doors open to any technology-based solutions to your teaching issues. Even having the students down for a lesson on finding and examining primary sources using the Library of Congress database of information would be great. Let's set something up together soon!
Best,
Jen
References:
Boyer, B. (2016). Meet your learners where they are: virtualizing the school library. Internet@Schools, 23(1), 4+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A440057567/AONE?u=nysl_ca_dmvacces&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=73a967ca
Wine, L. (2016). School librarians as technology leaders: An evolution in practice. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science. 57(2), 207-220.
What a great resource Jennifer!
ReplyDeleteI have been learning more and more about the Library of Congress and what they have to offer educators. It is truly exciting! One thing I love about your resource is that it offers choice for the teachers-- they can decide what topic they want to use AND they can decide if they want something ready made or make one themselves. It also provides scaffolding-- they might do a premade one the first time to see how it works, and then the next time create their own.
I think sharing things that are "ready to go" so to speak, increases the likelihood that the resource will be tried. It doesn't feel like one more thing!
Jennifer,
ReplyDeleteThis is such an amazing resource that I already bookmarked it for future use. I currently teach fifth grade and struggle to find good primary and secondary sources for my students that they haven't already seen in prior grades. Often times, I am focusing on helping them simply identify the difference between primary and secondary so I can still utilize the Library of Congress to show examples. This resource is also great for me as a GATE teacher to help scaffold learning to a higher level for differentiation.
Thank you for sharing,
Sam Howard
Jen, I loved this post! This is a resource I have not heard of before but I love it and will be using it in the future with students. Teaching primary sources is so important and the case master looks like a great place to find them. Thanks so much for sharing!
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