We are brainstorming what to call the new education web site we’re developing.  The site will give teachers the ability to locate resources and great primary source documents, and to create lessons for their classes right on the site.  What name for this web site would reflect both the long-standing goal of the National Archives Education Team to help teachers inspire students through primary sources and the novel attribute of an education web site to give teachers the space to create personalized lessons on site?

We are combing past resources created by the National Archives education team - online lesson plans, published “Teaching With Documents” articles from Social Education (from the National Council for the Social Studies), and materials from past National Archives workshops and presentations.  We will adapt teaching activities from these sources to the lesson templates/frameworks on the new education web site.  Are there any lessons from the National Archives that you like to use or have used in the past that you want to see adapted for the new site?

We’ve just put together our first visual representation of how the new education web site will work.  The chart below doesn’t reflect what the site will look like, but how it will function and be organized.

Chart Representing How the New Web Site Will Work

We envision the site with three main components - the lessons, the primary sources (”Records”), and a section in which teachers can create and customize their own lessons for the classroom (”Create”).  All of the lessons on the site will be constructed based on one of the several templates - or lesson frameworks - that will be available.  The templates are represented in the chart in pink.  The National Archives Education Team will create several ready-made, easily accessible lessons for teachers by inserting teachable primary sources into those templates.  That stockpile of National Archives model lessons is represented in blue.

We also wanted teachers to be able to use the web site as a resource to find primary sources and to customize entire lessons for their students.  Educators can look through the collection of primary sources (represented in green) to find documents to print or share with their classes.  Or they can pick out primary sources (green) to populate the lesson templates with (pink) to create customized lessons to use in the classroom, assign to their students, or share with fellow teachers.

Let us know what you think!