Teaching Resources

The following lists a variety of resources for continued professional development and teaching tools. The list includes references to standards, webinars, and other online resources for teachers to develop the skills and curricula.

PBS Learning Media	PBS Learning Media provides multi-media backed lesson plans, activities, and resources for teachers. The website allows for easy browsing by subject, grade, and standards. I have used this site to better incorporate media, particularly documentaries, into my lesson plans. Sometimes there are clips included on the site and documentaries are supplemented with information to add detail in the classroom.
Teaching History.Org	This site provides history teachers with teaching materials, history content, and best practices for teaching history. This site has some nice lesson plans with rubrics already created for those times when you need to add a lesson, but don’t want to re-create the wheel.
Resources for History Teachers	This is a wikispace created by teachers and students for teachers and students to provide access to history teaching sources for a variety of contexts. This site has nice timelines and topical pages for AP US History. It also includes maps and images of artifacts to add new perspectives to what textbooks offer.
Library of Congress	This site offers access to primary and secondary documents, exhibits, maps, photography, sound recordings, and video resources. I have often used the LoC as a source for political cartoons for students to analyze, but it also has wonderful collections and exhibition pages that group relevant materials together.
History Matters	This site provides history lesson plans and links to resource sites. Again, this can help teachers avoiding to recreate the wheel with their lesson plans. It also has many resources that could be used by students for further research.
National Archives	NARA has some nice data for history and geography courses in the way of census records and federal archives. I would use this data with my geography students to have them study changes in demographics.
Smithsonian Education	The Smithsonian site has both a student area and educator area. It includes interactive displays based on museum exhibits. This site would be a way to get students interacting with artifacts and assessing the presentation of material.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art	This site, naturally presents the art and exhibitions of the Met. Students could use this site to find patterns in art movements over time, and connect those patterns to social movements of different eras.
Digital History	This site has online US History textbook. It includes annotated primary sources on selected topics. This could easily be a textbook replacement or an additional source for student research.
Do History	This site isn’t the most sophisticated in design, but does lead the reader through the process of piecing together a story out of historical documents. Students could use this as an example before embarking on a similar project, in which they try to recreate a narrative of history supported by primary documents.