In June 2016, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their 25 Best Apps for Teaching and Learning. The apps encourage qualities such as innovation and active participation, and are user-friendly.
The app Spies of the Mississippi comes from a book by Rick Bowers, which was made into a PBS documentary. The app is filled with primary resources that tell the story of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which was founded in 1956 to preserve segregation and spy on the civil rights movement. The app has videos, a timeline, interactive map, as well as lesson plans and discussion questions.
Cost: Free Level: Middle and High School Platforms: iOS
Watch this video to get an idea of how the app works:
Were you scrambling for primary sources for history day projects or other curriculum needs this year? Scramble no more…next year could be different!
Minitex has announced a new resource for Minnesota Reflections users (MN Reflections is a digital collection of more than 257,000 images, maps, and documents). These primary source sets will be an online resource for students and teachers. Each focus on a historical topic and highlight the related resources available in MN Reflections. Some of the topics include American Indian boarding schools in MN, iron mining, and Fort Snelling.
These sets are intended to help develop critical thinking skills and allow students to be introduced to using and learning from primary source materials. Read the whole article here.
Image by RLHyde. Retrieved from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons’ licensing.
Many librarians teach formally and informally patrons/students how to conduct research. Dawn Casey-Rowe, a high school teacher and prominent writer for Edudemic, targets best practices for educators. This October, Casey-Rowe published an article titled, 10 Web Resources to Help Teach About Primary Sources. In this post, she talks about her experience with students after assigning a research paper pertaining to current events. She stated, “There is such an overload of information. Students need to be able to identify and decode sources, then make a decision as to what they mean in terms of causes and consequences.” Sound familiar? Casey-Rowe goes on to list resources that you might also find helpful, regardless of the researcher’s age.
One of the most common stumbling blocks in research is not understanding the best practices to conduct a search. In a related article, Holly Clark talks about the new “digital divide”as it relates to students’ ability to effectively find and process information while conducting searches. Here is a link to Clark’s full article, “Do Your Students Know How to Search?” also posted on Edudemic’s site (October 2013.)
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In June 2016, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their 25 Best Apps for Teaching and Learning. The apps encourage qualities such as innovation and active participation, and are user-friendly.
