Website Review: Teaching with Primary Sources

TEACHING WITH PRIMARY SOURCES from Thinkport Education contains a collection of inquiry kits.

This project contains almost a dozen social studies and history units using materials from the Library of Congress. The topics range from early American colonies to modern times. Each theme focuses on a question and includes a series of lessons and primary source documents.

Librarians will find this resource to be useful in teaching both inquiry and the use of primary source materials. In addition to the kits, be sure to check out the research learning modules and the additional resources.

To visit the website, go to http://www.thinkport.org/tps/.

Website Review: VisLit

VISLIT from the Toledo Museum of Art explores visual literacy, visual language, and the “art of seeing art”.

The “Why Visual Literacy” section examines reasons why it’s importance to understand visual language. The page features a video that introduces the concept.

The “Visual Language” section discusses visual communication and provides short videos focusing on creativity, critical thinking, educational achievement, empathy, and technology.

The “Art of Seeing Art” area makes that connection between visual literacy and art. This page takes students through six steps: look, observe, see, describe, analyze, and interpret. Although aimed at the topic of art, these steps can be applied to any visual situation.

Finally, many additional resources are provided including visual literacy curriculum materials for teachers.

Librarians will find this website to be an outstanding resource in teaching key concepts related to visual literacy. Although the project takes an art museum perspective, the resources can easily be adapted to the school library setting.

The “Do you speak visual?” project is a companion website that helps users understand the importance of graphic representations and how to “speak visual”.

To visit the Visual Literacy website, go to http://www.vislit.org/
To visit the Do You Speak Visual? website, go tohttp://doyouspeakvisual.com/.

Tech Review: Kinetic City: Active Explorer

KINETIC CITY: ACTIVE EXPLORER is a website and app used by educators to create Quests for their students.

Sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, educators use the website to build Quests using an easy-to-use web-based template. These activities may ask students to conduct experiments, observe their environment, or create a product. The Quest lists specific activities and lists of tasks for students to accomplish. Youth can share their notes, images, audio, video, and other communications using the App. They can also answer questions or create a chart.

Students create accounts and log in using the app to create their projects using a tool called SmartWorks. Youth can create comic strips, posters, ebooks and other projects.

The website also includes both a SmartWork Gallery of student projects and a Quest Gallery showing teacher-generated activities for grades K-12.

Librarians will find this easy-to-use website and app useful across the curriculum. It only takes a few minutes to create a Quest for students. Learners of all ages can use the app to record data and build projects that can be shared.

To learn more, go to http://www.active-explorer.com/.

App Review: Ripped Apart

RIPPED APART from The National Museum of American History is an engaging Civil War mystery app.

Based on real people and events from history, this app-based simulation game immerses youth in a fascinating photography history collection. Participants take on the role of a Smithsonian intern solving cases. Using historical photographs, users must decipher documents to solve authentic problems. The game examines various perspectives as players learn about the causes and key players in the Civil War. In addition, users can experiment with 19th century photography using their mobile device’s camera.

The project website contains interesting information about the real-world stories that serve as the basis for the engaging simulation.

Designed for young adults, librarians will find this app to be a fun way to explore primary source materials and learn about American history. Collaborate with the history teacher to connect library and history standards related to primary source documents and information inquiry in history.

Teachers may need to provide some guidance in the use of the simulation because no in-app directions are provided.

To learn more about the project and download the app, go to http://americanhistory.si.edu/ripped-apart.

Website Review: Zooniverse

ZOONIVERSE is a website that provides users the chance to participate in real discoveries through citizen science projects.

This collaborative volunteer project lets users contribute to real-world, cutting edge research across content areas including the sciences and humanities.

Participants can jump into dozens of current projects including transcribing historical documents, recording the life of chimpanzees, and characterizing bat calls.

Daily Zooniverse provides engaging, quick resources and activities that would make great lesson starters.

The Talk area provides a place where users can ask questions. The Blog shares the latest project news.

The companion website, ZOOTEACH contains high-quality lessons and resources that connect with the citizen science projects in the areas of sciences, mathematics, humanities, and arts. Resources are available for K-12 and higher education.

Librarians will find the many authentic projects a great catalyst for inquiry and learning. Use one of the projects to jumpstart an investigation in your library.

Visit the website at https://www.zooniverse.org/.

Visit the lessons at http://www.zooteach.org/.

Website Review: Curious

CURIOUS: GROW YOUR SKILLS is a website that provides short instructional videos on dozens of topics.

Although not specifically designed for K-12 students, the website contains many videos appropriate for secondary students. The videos are divided into ten sections including Biz, Brainy, Code, Craft, Food, Health, Life, Music, Photo, and Tech.

The Brainy section focuses on traditional school subjects such as biology, college prep, history, math, psychology, and science. In many cases, only the first lesson in a series is available for free. However for K-12 students this overview may meet classroom needs.

Many of the step-by-step lessons contain attachments and assignments to help with learning.

Live discussions are held with experts around the world. These are recorded, so students can go back and watch past events.

The website contains both a free and membership option. However, the free version includes over 1000 lessons, so it’s a great place to start.

Librarians will find this website to be a good alternative when seeking out videos on specific topics. Use the search tool to look for videos on specific topics.

To visit the website, go to https://curious.com/.

Website Review: The Why? Files

THE WHY? FILES: THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE NEW is an outstanding science website exploring the science connected with interesting and important news stories.

Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison with support from the National Institute for Science Education and National Science Foundation, the website features its newest stories on the entry page. Each story contains background information about the news story, a connection to the scientific topic of interest, related stories, and a bibliography. In addition, the stories incorporate interesting photographs, video clips, charts, diagrams, and other compelling images. A print-friendly version of each page is provided making these articles perfect for informational reading activities in the classroom.

The website includes the following key areas:

The Archives section provides a chronological list of articles by subject area including Arts & Humanities, Biology, Earth & Space, Environment, Health, Physical Science, Social Science, and Technology.

The Weather Guys section addresses questions related to weather science.

The Interactives section provides engaging games and other interactive experiences for youth.

The WHY-TV page displays short video clips on science topics.

The Book Review section focuses on book of interest to high school students and adults.

The Cool Science Images page provides a compelling image along with the back-story related to the visual. These would be wonderful images for scientific investigations or story starters.

The Teaching section is divided into Grades 5-8 and Grades 9-12. Educators can find stories that support the National Science Education standards. The classroom activities page provides discussion questions, activities, and quizzes related to science topics.

The built-in search engine can be used to locate articles by key word.

The website also connects to social media including Facebook and Twitter. The RSS feed makes it easy to incorporate into your library or school website.

To explore the website, go to http://whyfiles.org/.

Website Review: Wonderpolis

WONDEROPOLIS is a website that encourages imagination, creativity, and inquiry. Launched in 2010, this free website is overflowing with ideas that promote creative and critical thinking. The Wonder of the Day section features over 1300 topics asking questions like “How are pickles made?”. These “Wonders” can be searched by grade level and subject area. In addition, they’re aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Educators can share ideas in the Educator Sandbox area.

Teacher librarians can use this website to jumpstart inquiry-based learning projects and get students thinking about questioning. The tagline for the website is “where the wonders of learning never cease”. It’s a wonderful message for people of all ages.

To learn more, go to WONDEROPOLIS at http://wonderopolis.org/