In designing the new education web site, we have brainstormed and are currently crafting several different learning activities to be done online. Teachers will be able to use these online activities with students in a large-group setting or share with students via web links (URLs). We are designing these activities like “frameworks” - the structure of an activity will always remain the same. We will fill these frameworks with rich documents from the holdings of the National Archives but the frameworks will also be flexible enough to be used with different primary source documents from different historical eras. We’d like to give educators the ability to change out the documents inside the activities and to pick other documents from our holdings to place inside. Therefore, teachers will be able to use the online activities as ready-made activities by using them with the suggested documents; or they may customize them by choosing different documents.
When we give teachers using this new website the option to choose other primary source documents to place inside the activity frameworks, how many choices will they want? For instance, the National Archives Education Team can hand pick and limit the number of documents that teachers will be able to choose from; or we can give teachers the ability to search through the approximately 92,000 images available digitally in our online Archival Research Catalog (ARC). Which option would teachers prefer? Should we do both - give teachers the option to choose a hand-picked set of documents as well as the option to search through ARC?