Welcome to getting started with DocsTeach finding and saving activities.
This is DocsTeach.org the online tool for teaching with documents from the
National Archives. The National Archives is an independent federal agency that
preserves and protects the historically valuable records of the United States
government and makes them available to the public. We have billions of records
at the National Archives and among those records are incredible primary sources
for teaching history and civics. So we created DocsTeach.org to make finding
those primary sources and sharing those primary sources with your students a
little easier. Today we're going to take, check out how to find and share activity
tools for teaching with primary sources that you can share with your students.
But before we dive into how to find activities, let's do a quick overview of
what is an activity tool. So from the DocsTeach homepage i'm going to go to
menu, activity tools, all tools, and this gives us an overview of these twelve
different activity templates for teaching with primary sources. Each of
these tools will help students develop historical thinking, skills practice
primary source analysis. And the tools focus on different skills, we have tools
for analyzing documents, we have tools for focusing on details, really
spotlighting different parts of documents or focusing on different parts
of images, we have tools for comparing and contrasting different documents,
tools for finding a sequence, mapping history ,weighing the evidence using
primary sources to support two different historical interpretations. There are
twelve different tools to choose from and clicking on one of these tools will
give you an overview of the learning objectives, some recommendations if you
want to create your own activity using this template, and how to teach with this
tool. Let's go back to the DocsTeach homepage and find out how we can find an
activity tool and share it with our students. So on this page,
first I should mention I'm currently logged into my DocsTeach account now.
Anyone can visit DocsTeach and find primary sources or search for activities
created by the National Archives education team. However if you create a
free account you will also be able to browse activities that have been created
and published on DocsTeach by your fellow educators, you'll be able to save
the activities that you find, you'll be able to view students responses to
activities online, and even create your own or modify existing activities. So
since I'm logged into my account you'll see some of those additional features.
Today let's start by clicking discover activities you can teach with. I'm going to
go ahead and on this page do a simple keyword search. You can start with a
keyword search or you can dive in by browsing by historical era since we have
the records of the US government we have records from the revolution and the new
nation up through contemporary United States. You also find activities that are
geared towards teaching civics and government or activities that kind of
span historical eras. You can also narrow down your search in four ways. You can
narrow down your search by historical era here, you can also narrow down your
search by grade level, the thinking skill the activity promotes or if you're
looking for one of those particular activity tools that we just saw an
overview of you can search specifically by tool. I'm going to start with a simple
keyword search in this case let's do a search for civil rights.
Okay the search pulls up 104 results, as we start to look through these
activities you'll see once created by the National Archives education team and
as you go further through your search you'll find activities created and
published by other educators. This is where, as we can see we
have activities that span different historical eras, this can be where
narrowing narrowing down your search by historical era can be helpful. So for
example if we want to focus on civil rights in the post-world War two era we
can narrow it down to 1945 five to the 1970s. It also might be
helpful to narrow your search to the grade level you're currently teaching so
let's go ahead and do a search for middle school activities. We can now find
eleven different results that come up and we'll go ahead and click on our
first activity. Now while we did a search for a middle school activity it's worth
noting that if you're searching for elementary or middle school activity
activities can work for a multiple grade level so it's worth searching a grade
above or below your target audience. So for example well this one is tagged
middle school when we look at the description we find it can work for
grades four through eight as well. This page that we're looking at is the
teacher page, this is information for you the person facilitating this activity.
You'll find information about the historical era it connects to, the
thinking skill it correlates, to the Bloom's taxonomy level, you'll find a
brief description of the activity and some suggested teaching instructions, for
National Archives activities this will also include an estimated time that it
will take to facilitate this activity. these suggested teaching instructions
will also provide some guidance on how to facilitate this activity. In this case
this is recommended to present this one to the entire class but with DocsTeach
there are a lot of different ways you can share these activities with your
students. As we scroll down the page you'll also find a list of the documents
used in this activity to give you that overview. If you'd like to share this
activity with your students you'll want to click start activity. This takes us to
the student page. This is the link you would share with your students, so you
could share this to an entire class you could share your screen and share it
with your students that way and have a discussion around this particular image.
Since this is the zoom crop activity students will start by looking at a
zoomed in portion of this image a little click switch view to see the whole image
and put the story together. There are some discussion questions students can
consider as they examine this particular image as well as when you're done
question to wrap up this activity. So this could be done
together as a class but there are also ways you can assign students to complete
activities online so we'll dive into that in a moment. Let's say you like the
look of this activity you want to save it for later ,well if we go back to our
teacher page there are some options for doing that. These three icons here give
you some additional tools, so the star icon will allow you to bookmark this
activity and as we, when we click star the activity we'll see a drop down menu that
says bookmark this activity in my activities and you can choose a
classroom, a classroom is simply a group of activities that you've saved together.
I'm going to go ahead and add this one to my default classroom in a moment
you'll also see the option for making a copy of this activity if you want to
modify the questions or or change it up a little bit you can make a copy and
actually go in and change it, or you can print the entire activity. Let's go ahead
and add this to my default classroom
so when we g to, when we add an activity it takes us to our my activities page, we
can go to we can also access this page by clicking menu, my account, my
activities, and here we see a collection activities that I put together on this
page. We'll see a couple of options, we can customize the names of our folders
we can move items around we can remove them from folders and we can also share
activities with fellow educators or with our students from this page. So for
example if you have a group of activities that you'd like to share with
students or with teachers you can click on copy link to share this creates two
links the first link is one you can share with teachers that'll provide
links to the teacher pages of the activities or you can share links with
your students this link will give will create a link where students can access
the student pages of each of these activities. Well let's go back to our
search and take do another keyword search and talk a little bit more about
how you can share activities with your students to complete online. So I'm going
to go back to the home page let's do that civil rights search again, this time
we're going to modify it by high school
So again we can see activities of different types from different eras
let's take a look at the impact of Bloody Sunday in Selma. In this activity
students will review a series of documents answering questions as they go
along, so this is an example of an activity that pulls together multiple
primary sources. Again we're seeing that this activity works for grades 7 through
12 and the approximate time needed is 45 minutes. But let's click on start
activity, again this is the student URL if you wanted your students to complete
this activity online and review their responses what you would do is you would
start by sharing this URL with your students.
Then students would go through these different primary sources answering
questions and putting responses as they go along and when they're done they
click when you're done, there's usually a wrap-up question for them to complete
and then they can submit their activity responses to you. Now I should mention
students do not need a DocsTeach account to complete an activity all they need to
do is enter in their name, enter in your email address associated with your
account, enter their response and click send response you can then review your
students completed activities, so no account required for the students they
just need your email address that you've linked to your DocsTeach account and
you'll be able to review their responses to this activity. Now to find your
responses you would go to menu, my account, my students responses, and you
would be able to find their completed activities here. Now there are additional
ways you can organize these responses different ways you can assign student
work, we'll go over those in more detail in a future session, but the basics are
all you need to do is share that student URL with your students, they type in your
email address associated with their account and submit their responses for
you to review. And again if we go back to menu my account, my activities ,you can
even click on that copy link to share, copy the link to share with students
which takes us to a collection of activities which when your students
click on them they will get access to these student pages where they could
then complete the activity and submit their responses for you to review. Now if
you're new to docsteach another great place to get started looking for primary
sources and activities is the Popular Topics pages, these can be found by
clicking on menu, Popular Topics and these are curated collections of primary
sources and activities we put together on a variety of topics. Today we've seen
how you could use DocsTeach to find activities for teaching different
historical topics, DocsTeach is also great for teaching civics
for example, if we click on the Constitution, we'll find a list of
primary sources for teaching some of the big ideas from the Constitution as well
as activities for hitting the civics topics like checks and balances in
action and the First Amendment or if we click on the Constitution at Work
we'll find a matching activity where students analyze primary sources from
the National Archives and then connect them to the different article and
section of the Constitution that they embody. So again, this first page is for
you the educator gives you some information on and what this activity is
all about how to facilitate it sometimes there are some additional helpful links
that are included in that description, and then to share it with your students
you would share the URL you find when you click start activity and then
students would be able to complete this matching activity on their own and
submit their completed activity to you to review. Well now it's your turn! The
best way to get started is to dive right in, create your free account start
searching for primary sources and activities ,and you can always stay up to
date on the latest on DocsTeach by following us on Twitter @DocsTeach and
tuning in for future webinars.