Library of Congress
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
There are more resources on the web than any one person can possibly keep up with – that’s why we need organized collections like those at www.ohiotreasurechest.org and www.d3a2.org to help sort it out. The great part is that there’s that much material, the bad part is that it’s easy to overlook great stuff.
One such resource is the Library of Congress (LOC) website – www.loc.gov. It’s really not possible to write an exhaustive post on the breadth of the resources on the LOC site. The “Selected Resources for School Librarians and Teachers” guide alone lists 37 specific collections.
The scope of resources includes such items as:
- historical collections
- veterans history
- an international section
- prints and photographs
- children’s literature
- poetry for American high schools
- terrorism studies
- copyright information
- a map collection of “Places in the News!“
- and LOC webcasts.
This is to name only a small handful.
As a starting point, let me point you to three items from the site:
- LOC Teachers’ Page: www.loc.gov/teachers
- Selected Resources for School Librarians and Teachers (PDF): memory.loc.gov/learn/educators/handouts/school_lbn.pdf
- Handouts: memory.loc.gov/learn/educators/handouts
Tags: Elementary, Library of Congress, Middle, Resources, Secondary
January 24th, 2008 at 9:34 am
The elementary library aide raised an interesting situation that our students in grades 4-6 face – the readability of websites. She said students are often given research reports/projects to do that require them to use web sources, but many of them that have the content they need are not written at a level that they can comprehend. I asked her if students were using the “Info Ohio” collection, and she said that was what they are using. The readabilty of the site makes it very difficult if not impossible for students to work independently and still develop deep understanding of the topic. Do you have some suggestions for content rich sites that are designed for 4th or 5th grade reading skills?