Getting started with DocsTeach
This session will focus on finding and saving primary source documents.
The National Archives has over 16 billion records
These are items created by or collected by the government in the course of business. Among these records
you can find paper documents photographs audio recordings video recordings posters and so much more.
Millions of these records are digitized and available on our online
catalog and then to streamline the process of finding primary sources
for the classroom and to provide resources for sharing these primary sources with your students. We created DocsTeach.org.
Primary sources on DocsTeach have been chosen by the National Archives
education team that correspond to topics we know educators are teaching in history and civics classrooms.
And we're always adding more.
Anyone can search for primary sources on DocsTeach,
however, if you create a free DocsTteach account
You can save and organize the primary sources you find into folders
then you can share those folders with your colleagues and with your students or plug them into teaching activities
We're going to get started today with a simple keyword search
So I'm currently on the dDocsTeach.org homepage. I'm going to click explore primary sources.
From this page we could start browsing by historical era starting with revolution in the new nation up
to contemporary United States
1968 to the present
But I'm going to start with a search and let's just use World War One as an example
As we can see we have over
706 or over 700 documents show up for WWI. Let's click on one to
check it out
At the top we'll get the document title then we'll see an image of the document
We can really zoom in and take a closer
look, if the document has multiple pages you'll be able to navigate them here and then you'll see some background information
available on this document
Now for this particular document a transcription is available, not all documents have transcripts available on DocsTeach,
it's an ongoing process, we're always adding more, but in the case of this one we can see the transcription
and also share that with our students. As
we scroll to the bottom of this document you'll find information on where this document came from, it's from the records of American
Expeditionary Forces from World War One, the National Archives Identifier, if you click on this link it will take you
to the National Archives catalog
And here's the full citation that you can copy and paste this as well
You'll also see a note about the rights of this document, In
most cases the documents you find will be in the public domain, things created by the United States government,
there are a few exceptions in our holdings and if there is an exception, you'll find that noted here.
Let's scroll back up to the top of the page and
head back to our
search. I want to show you a couple of ways you can narrow down your search
You could modify your search by historical era or document type
So for example, we could pull up photographs we have in our holdings related to WWI,
or we could remove that filter and focus on
Video recordings
Opening a video recording you'll find a video player where you can view the video in DocsTteach and also a link back to
where you can find it in the National Archives catalog
You could also refine your search by
Artwork and artifacts, posters, maps, audio recordings and so on
You could also choose to do a more specific search. Let's say you're looking for WWI records related to
women's roles in the war. So if I just do a search for WWI and women,
make sure I clear that filter from before
I'm going to find a variety of documents that come up
start to tell us a little bit more about women's work in the war including
work in the the Red Cross
petitions for women's suffrage that discuss
WWI
and so much more
Or you could also search for a specific document. So let's try a search for the
Zimmermann telegram
So, yes, we have the Zimmermann telegram
We also have the decode work sheet for the Zimmerman telegram and the telegram with the translations. Let's check out this document
Again we have multiple pages available in some cases. You'll find all of the pages of a document available
Sometimes we'll have select
pages from
from longer documents available on DocsTeach
We also have some options for if you want to save this document for later.
If you click the star button, you can create a folder and save this document for later.
You can create a new folder or simply add it to your default folder.
I'll show you where you can create new folders
And rename your folders in just a moment, and where you'll find this document after you save it.
You also see the option to download this document
This will download all document images into a zip file that you can then use to share with your students or use in a presentation
You can print this page
Or you can use the plus sign to this document to a teaching activity
Looking at the individual pages of this document you could also download the individual image files or add individual pages to an online
teaching activity
Let's find out where we can find our documents after we save them. To access your saved documents, you will go to menu,
my account,
my documents, and
on this page we'll find the documents that we've saved in our default folder.
Now if you'd like to create new folders if you scroll down to the bottom of this page
You can create a new folder and you can organize your folders any way you wish whether it's by subject matter,
Class periods, whichever makes sense to you.
You can also select documents from a folder and choose to move them to
remove them completely from that folder, if you want to delete a folder you'll need to make sure that your documents
are completely removed from a folder you've created and then you'll be able to delete your folder.
You could also choose to share a collection of documents with your students with your fellow educators
You can do that by clicking on the link icon next to your folder name
This will give you a link that you can copy and share and this way you can share a a document set
with your students. You'll also see an option to rename your folders here.
The National Archives has
incredible resources for for teaching history and civics so it's best to get started by trying your own keyword searches
I you can also search for specific pieces of legislation,
Supreme Court cases, you can do a search by type of document we have
thousands of petitions for and against all sorts of topics,
issues, pieces of legislation, that are great for bringing in multiple points of view on an issue into a lesson.
You can do more of a thematic search do a search for checks and balances to find documents that help illustrate
that big idea from the Constitution. Another great place to get started is to check out our popular topics pages. If I click menu
popular topics, I'm going to click see all.
You can find these curated collections of primary sources
that you can share with
Your students as well as teaching activities from the National Archives. So for example, if we click on
Amending America,
this is a popular topics page we created in conjunction with an exhibit at the National Archives
You'll find collections of primary sources for teaching the idea of freedom of speech,
resources for teaching the suffrage amendments. These will be located on the left side on the right side
You'll find teaching activities that you can share with your students as well.
So for example clicking on suffrage amendments will find not only examples of those amendments but also
petitions
related to those amendments as they worked through Congress and and went to the States.
Another resource I want to point out our resources for document analysis. So if we click menu,
resources,
document analysis, you will find PDF versions of the National Archives'
analyzing documents worksheets.
We have two different sets of worksheets one for novice or younger students or those learning English and one for intermediate or secondary students
We have different worksheets for the different types of primary sources your students may encounter.
So for example if we click on photograph
We'll open up a PDF that shows the four different sets of questions
our worksheets walk students through meeting the document, observing its parts, trying to make sense of it, and using it as historical evidence
Going back to the analyzing documents page,
You can also find these same questions available as a tool on DocsTeach.
This is our analyzing documents tool. I
Want to show you quickly how these same questions
appear on DocsTeach in the teaching activity and how you can quickly create and analyzing documents
activity to share with your students. So for example, here is a child labor photograph
This is the teacher page with information for you on how to facilitate the activity
Clicking start activity takes us to the URL you would share with your students to complete an activity
Students do not need a DocsTeach account to complete an activity
And as we scroll down we see a photograph as well as the same document analysis questions
We saw on the PDF worksheets.
So students would enter their responses into these fields and at the end they would type in
their name,
Your email address associated with your DocsTeach account their final response and send their response for you to review
in DocsTeach. Now future sessions will cover how to assign and review student work in DocsTeach,
but I wanted to show how these worksheets are available in this activity tool.
Let's say you want to take one of the primary sources you find and pop it into this analyzing documents activity.
Well, let's go back to my account, my documents,
Let's take a look at a photo I saved earlier
from a WWI search,
and
I'm going to go ahead and click the plus sign to create a new activity and put documents in it.
Then to find the activity I'll go to menu, my account, my activities.
Here's the activity I've just created we can see it's not published because it's a brand new activity
I've just started, if I click edit & manage activity,
I'll now be able to go through the steps of setting up this activity
I'm just going quickly show how this works and then we have lots of
additional instructions that walk you through in a step by step process on DocsTeach.
But basically you'll want to choose that
Analyzing Documents as the activity type, you'll want to do a student title and the teacher title, they can be the same.
You'll also see an opportunity for you to decide how you want to be attributed, how you want to attribute yourself to this activity,
and this is where you'll publish it to DocsTeach or not. Now if you'd like students to be able to submit their responses online,
you will need to publish your activity. But right now since we're working on it, we're not going to publish it yet.
Then you'll want to save early and often,
And you'll see instructions on what you'll need to do to complete this activity
outlined right there for you. We'll go through these tabs to go through the different steps
You can choose if you just want your document available, or if you want the document and background information available,
There's a set up option where you can decide if you crop the document or if you use the full image in this activity. We
go to analysis questions, this is where you'll choose the level
So if you want those questions for younger students, or if you want the intermediate or secondary students,
you'll choose the document type to make sure you pull up the correct set of questions. So we'll choose photograph
click save, and
Then from here, we'll see those same questions that we saw in the example of the activity
we looked at, on the document analysis worksheets. You can now add additional questions
remove questions, you can customize them from this point to suit your students needs.
Then of course we'll save, the next steps would be filling out additional instructions for students on that student page
Previewing the activity, you can add some instructions for teachers on how to facilitate this activity,
tag the historical era, thinking skill, Bloom's Taxonomy level, and grade level this activity corresponds to and then when you're ready you can publish it.
From there, you'll be able to share the URL, the student URL with your students,
they can go through that same process of answering those questions
in DocsTeach entering your email address associated with your account and submitting their responses.
Once your activity has been published. You can always find your activity
on
the My Activities page.
If you take a break and not work on the entire thing in the whole time so here it's not published yet
but we have the option to edit and manage the activity and if it was ready to go we could click on this link to
Open up the activity. So that's just a really quick overview of how once you find primary sources
you want to share with your students, you could use the analyzing documents
activity tool on DocsTeach to quickly share these activities with your students and
then to review the responses you'd be able to find them under my account,
my students responses.
Well, the next step is to get started! Start doing some searches
You're going to find lots of primary sources for teaching US history and civics topics
And if you find something cool, let us know you can always let us know on Twitter @DocsTeach.