via Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has continued to develop material sets to assist teachers in utilizing the library’s resources. One such collection is their Primary Sources section.

Newly added sets in this collection include political cartoons and sources on children’s lives at the turn of the 20th century.

via Library of Congress

Guides for teachers and students offer some excellent questions to encourage the reader to think critically about the resource. You may note that these are very similar to the critical questions in yesterday’s post on validating resources.

From the LOC Teachers’ Resources on Primary Documents:

Encourage students to speculate about each source, its creator, and its context.

• What was happening during this time period?
• What was the creator’s purpose in making this primary source?
• What does the creator do to get his or her point across?
• What was this primary source’s audience?
• What biases or stereotypes do you see?

Ask if this source agrees with other primary sources, or with what the students already know.

• Ask students to test their assumptions about the past.
• Ask students to find other primary or secondary sources that offer support or contradiction.

[via Library of Congress]

• Friday: Updates to Adobe Reader and introducing Evernote [Productivity tools]
• Today: A different perspective on validating resources [Information Literacy]
• Tuesday: Primary source political cartoons and resources for understanding bias  and perspective [Information Literacy]
• Wednesday:  When to credit an image source [Intellectual Property and Ethics]

Whenever I’ve discussed criteria for evaluating resources I’ve always approached that with 5 basic areas, each being a potential red flag source:

1. Accuracy – Is the material free of both grammatical or content errors?
2. Authority – What do we know about this author’s level of expertise on the topic?
3. Objectivity/Bias – What potential biases may the author(s) hold? Is this particular topic prone to bias?
4. Currency – Is the information current enough for the topic/purpose studied? A 30 year-old resource covering our 1st president might be sufficient while a 3 year-old resource would be insufficient for a study of our current president.
5. Coverage – Is the depth of coverage appropriate for the research to be conducted?

Teacher Chris Betcher has a similar list of criteria. On two of the points he describes, our criteria are similar. After that, however, the two groups begin to diverge. Betcher’s list shifts toward a focus on the website itself and its interaction with the user, and in doing so raises some additional good points for both the author and the consumer.

What I most enjoyed about Betcher’s list are the guiding questions that accompany each point. These are great questions for you or your students to ask yourselves when evaluating content.

Jump directly to Betcher’s notes on SlideShare.com

[via What Do You Believe? on The Thinking Stick]

Good options for primary source documents are always a plus. Primary sources presented well are even better. Take a look at the National Archives’ Digital Vaults Collection.

“Digital Vaults gives you and your kids a place to find raw materials that are arranged in ways that may make more sense to them. The site is set up a bit like a social network. Data is organized by tags and linked to both the tags as well as other resources. Like a social network, you can make your favorites documents / materials your “friends,” search for new “friends” by using tags and create “mashups” using primary sources.” (History Tech blog)

If you’re looking for support materials for students and teachers, including lessons plans for use with primary source documents, visit the Vault’s Educators and Students page.

Are there times when you already know the definition of something but lack the word to describe it? Merriam-Webster’s visual dictionary is a resource for just that situation. 6,000 color images illustrating and defining over 20,000 items make this a great way to find the names of various things that you might otherwise have struggled to define. Everything from plants and animals to heavy machinery to sports to the kitchen sink is found in this collection.

The labeled illustrations could be helpful for teaching content area subject matter, such as cells or the parts of a plant. I can also see great potential for ESL students just looking to learn the names of common items (take a look at the Society section for illustrations of cities, health, and public safety items). Links to recorded pronunciations make this tool even more useful.

[via Lifehacker]

www.free.ed.gov

There is a wealth on information available on the websites for government agencies. However, given that there are so many of them (agencies, that is), hunting down good stuff can be hard to do, especially for students who have less experience with search skills, or even a limited ability to scan through materials.

This site brings the resources of well over 60 different organizations together in one place. As described on the site’s “About FREE” page:

“FREE makes it easier to find teaching and learning resources from the federal government.

“More than 1,500 federally supported teaching and learning resources are included from dozens of federal agencies. New sites are added regularly.

“FREE is among the most popular K-12 websites maintained by the U.S. Department of Education because of the many great resources being offered by participating federal agencies.”

The major subject groupings include:

• Arts & Music
• Health & Phys Ed
• Language Arts
• Math
• Science
• World Studies
• U.S. History, including
  • Business & Work
  • Ethnic Groups
  • Famous People
  • Government
  • Movements
  • States and Regions
  • Wars
  • Other History & Social Studies
• U.S. Time Periods

Receive free.ed.gov resource updates via their RSS feed at: http://www.ed.gov/free/free-rss.xml

PBS Kids Go! “Don’t Buy It: Get Media Smart” helps students understand the ways in which people and products are often portrayed by the entertainment and advertising media.

“Children spend the majority of their days consuming mass media. On average, children spend four-and-a-half hours a day using television, video games and computers. Yet children are not provided with the tools needed to evaluate and analyze the media messages they see.”

The site is interactive and visually interesting. Teacher and parent guides are included, as well as bios of a few “Teen Heroes” who are noted for their roles in combating media issues they perceive as harmful. This a great resource for addressing the evaluation of communications as outlined in the tech standards.

Find the site online at http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/.

Target audience: Grades 3-5

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[via TechLearning]

Google’s Custom Search allows such customization. With Custom Search you can make a number of modifications to the search process you direct your students to use. Educational users may also opt out of displaying Google Ads on their results page.

This is a great opportunity to pare down search results for specific projects or younger researchers just learning their way around mainstream search tools. I am not suggesting the use of Google Custom Search in lieu of teaching students to use the real-world web, but rather as a chance to make searches better for specific situations.

The example here will search all of the ESC’s pages, even though we have content hosted on at least three servers at two different locations.

(As of publication time, Google still isn’t indexing new content on the ESC website very well, so the results aren’t likely to be complete or current. This is not problem with the Custom Search tool itself.)

The URL for your custom site is less than pretty, so I would recommend linking to it from your classroom website (or Progress Book).

For a more detailed explanations see the Google Custom Search site or see Read/Write Web’s writeup, Google Custom Search: Setting the Bar for Vertical Search Engines. Thanks to Jim Vincent at SPARCC for passing along a heads-up on the education application of this tool.

INFOsearch allows the user to search many of INFOhio’s resources simultaneously. This resource will make it quicker and easier to locate good content via INFOhio. Records can be targeted toward the usual K-5 /6-8 /9-12 groups and can be filtered by resource types.

Tip: This would be a good place to introduce students to search skills using multiple databases.

More information:

• Full Press release from Theresa Frederick, Executive Director of INFOhio
• INFOsearch Frequently Asked Questions