Tag Archives: history

Academic, Check this out:, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Recommended Ed Tech Tool: National Constitution Center

Image by Stan Faryna. Retrieved from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons licensing. Some rights reserved.
Image by Stan Faryna. Retrieved from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons licensing. Some rights reserved.

At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, on September 17, 1787, the U.S. Constitution was signed by 38 of the 41 delegates present (This Day in US History.) Two years later this document would become the foundation of the Country’s Bill of Rights.

Therefore, this week CMLE’s Recommend Ed Tech Tool is the National Constitution Center’s website. This phenomenal resource is broken down into three main components;

  1. The Experience Center showcases exhibits, programs, museum links and current initiatives.
  2. Search Constitutional Articles, Amendments, and Issues by using the Explore the Constitution tab.
  3. And finally, click on the Learn tab to participate in free and live webcasts (Constitutional Hall Pass), find out more about civic holidays and how they became recognized, incorporate recommended resources from the educational resources page, and much more.

Tip: If you work with a teacher interested in traveling to the nation’s capital, the Plan Your Trip tab provides tickets, visitor’s guides and lists with links for trip essentials.

Academic, Check this out:, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Recommended EdTech Tool: Capture U.S. History

Image by BigTallGuy some rights reserved
Image by BigTallGuy some rights reserved

This week CMLE highlights a  free EdTech Tool to use in your library that encapsulates the United States (U.S.) in pictures (image gallery).  The Measuring America—People, Places and Our Economy site was created from the U.S. Census Bureau’s collection of historic photographs of enumerators, advertising, household scenes, buildings and technology. The images are searchable by decade from 1790 to 2010. Click Here to access the free historic images.

Note,  the tab titled Through the Decades: Fast Facts provides a “popular culture context” that paints a statistical and cultural portrait of the U.S..  This online timeline highlights the innovations, events and icons through the decades. Click here to access fast facts.

Tip: This EdTech Tool could be a wonderful resource for you to assist teacher(s) in your building or school that assign an annual decades or U.S. history project. 

Academic, Check this out:, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Round 3 of MN Reflections

Help us add collections to Minnesota Reflections

The Minnesota Digital Library will accept applications for digitization projects until March 28, 2008. You may submit your applications anytime before then. Projects are to digitize original photos, negatives, artwork, letters, journals, documents and maps.We spend our grant dollars to do the digitization work. Contributing organizations choose the projects and complete applications. Once our digitization work is complete, the contributors then fill in an Excel spreadsheet with information on each item (metadata work).Any organization that holds historic objects and is interested in doing a project should contact Marian Rengel, Minnesota Digital Library outreach coordinator, very soon to talk over the details. (mrrengel@stcloudstate.edu; 320-308-5625)In Rounds 1 and 2, conducted since August, the MDL committed to digitizing 1,690 photos, 18,770 document pages, and 1,009 maps. These projects, along with transcriptions for many of the documents, will spend 80 percent of our grant dollars. We still have ample funding for large and small projects.Our call for project proposals, which describes what we are looking for this year and which contains the application, is available at
http://www.mndigital.org/news_events/news_events.htm#phase4proposals

Marian Rengel
Outreach Coordinator
Minnesota Digital Library Coalition
St. Cloud State University
Office (320) 308-5625
Fax (320) 308-4778 (shared)Visit the Minnesota Digital Library’s collection site at http://reflections.mndigital.org/ and our home at http://www.mndigital.org/