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!

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?

We’ve been having regular discussions lately here at the National Archives about how we can give teachers the activities that they will want and use on the new education web site.  Would teachers (especially pre-service teachers) rather have ready-made activities that they can use right away with their students?  Or, would they prefer to have the ability to customize and create activities online that incorporate primary source many documents available from the National Archives?

On the new education site we’re building, we want to give educators access to great resources - and make them easy to get to!  What if we arranged resources in different ways?  Maybe . . .

• chronologically
• thematically
• by type of activity
• by historical thinking skill emphasized in the activity
• Or??

Our on-site team met yesterday to brainstorm these “buckets” as well as the kinds of skills we’d like teachers to be able to help their students learn with the help of this new site.  As we build the site with an audience of pre-service teachers and methods instructors in mind, what kinds of skills do you think are the most important to emphasize?  What historical thinking skills are most important?  To what extent does their importance vary depending on the age of our students?

This week at the National Archives we’re in the Concept Development phase of our new education web site project.  We are thinking about the primary function of the site and its specific objectives - how can we best help educators inspire their students using primary sources?  Primary sources provide a bridge to the past, a way for students to connect to historical time periods, people, and - particularly in the case of documents from the National Archives - the American government in authentic ways.  And we’re also thinking about the content we want available on the site and how to provide avenues to primary sources for educators.  The new site is geared specifically for pre-service teachers and methods instructors and we want to determine the best resources that NARA has to offer this audience - what great tools do we have that will become invaluable for our audience?

In your opinion, what is NARA’s most valuable online resource for educators?  What resource do you currently use on www.archives.gov?