DocsTeach is really starting to take shape! We’ve been working on the design of the new site and have been writing lessons that teachers will be able to grab and use right away with students.

We’ve also decided on the basic structure for six different lesson or activity templates that teachers will be able to plug primary source documents into to create customized lessons. We designed these lesson templates around historical thinking skills. They were made to help students practice the kinds of activities that historians really do. Now we need to come up with a name for each template that reflects the skill being practiced.

What names for these activities would reflect that historians really do these things?

• Analyzing primary sources including charts, graphs, and tables of data to form meaning and understand history through data analysis.

• Sorting through primary sources and finding documents that relate to one another to tell a broader story.

• Pulling apart primary sources, zooming in on specific content, and encountering a document cold and trying to make sense of what is going on.

• Making sense of history by connecting events and the primary sources that describe them, linking documents together to formulate the whole story.

• Locating historical events spatially in order to understand history in a way they could not have without thinking geographically.

We think that one of the most exciting features of the new web site will be that most of the lessons on it will have been created by educators who use DocsTeach in their classrooms.  The site will provide the tools and primary sources to every teacher to create lessons.  To give the site a jump start, we’re writing some lessons for the launch.

On Monday, I spent the morning wrapping up a woman suffrage lesson I have been working on.  The lesson will prompt students to use the interactive tools on DocsTeach to analyze and arrange a set of documents related to woman suffrage in the correct chronological order.  Some of the documents I chose include a form letter from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone asking friends to send petitions in 1865, Susan B. Anthony’s 1873 record of conviction for voting when it was considered illegal to do so, a memorial from the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage in 1917, and a 1919 ratification of the 19th Amendment.  Creating this lesson caused me to reflect on the road to suffrage and at the same time raised questions about the struggle - just as I hope the lesson does for students.  With the lesson fresh in my mind, I headed to the polls yesterday morning to perform my civic duty and vote.  My experience seemed different this time, and I was reminded once more how primary sources can help connect us - and our students - to the past like nothing else in our studies.

-Stephanie, Collaborate Team