Teaching Copyright
As today's tech-savvy teens become increasingly involved with technology and the Internet for learning, work, civic engagement, and entertainment, it is vital to ensure that they understand their legal rights and responsibilities under copyright law and also how the law affects creativity and innovation.
This curriculum is designed to give teachers a comprehensive set of tools to educate students about copyright while incorporating activities that exercise a variety of learning skills. Lesson t
Earth Exploration Toolbook Chapter: Measuring Distance and Area in Satellite Images
Users download and analyze MODIS imagery from 2001 and 2003 to quantify the shrinking of the Aral Sea. The chapter steps users through downloading, installing, and measuring with ImageJ, a freely available image analysis program. Users employ the software to set the spatial calibration of an image, then select and measure distances directly from the image. Measurement results are reported in real-world units. Users also select, measure, and compare the area covered by the sea in three time-serie
Earth Exploration Toolbook Chapter: Investigating Earthquakes: GIS Mapping and Analysis
This activity describes the technique of preparing latitude-longitude based data so it can be imported into a geographic information system (GIS). The chapter describes the steps to create a map to display data and guides users through some basic geographic analyses. The focus of the chapter's case study is earthquake prediction. Users download and format near real-time and historical earthquake data from the USGS. They import the data into ArcVoyager Special Edition GIS software, and analyze pa
The Geologic Time Scale
This resource presents a table of the Geologic Time Scale. The time scale begins with a brief description of the Precambrian Era, and proceeds through the Cambrian Period starting 544 million years ago and concluding with the Holocene Epoch of today. The time periods are explained and include the dates, scientific names, historical descriptions, and common names. The table is organized by Era, Period or System, and Epoch or Series.
Correlates of Desistance
There is no question that life in America has changed drastically in the past fifty years. Given the importance of examining historical change inherent in the life course perspective, it is important to determine how changes in the social structure over time impact individuals. Therefore, the goals of this data analysis exercise are to examine changes in marriage and employment over the last fifty years. The purposes are to identify the changes that have taken place, and to hypothesize how these
Community Organizing Toolkit Game
The Toolkit is a set of resources that supports face-to-face training for residents and community leaders. The computer-based component (the "Organizing Game") is used to introduce concepts, prompt discussion, and allow residents to practice skills in a safe, non-threatening environment. The initial focus of the Toolkit is teaching Doorknocking, an organizing technique that's particularly effective in moving issues within a local community.
American Egyptomania
This website is devoted to exploring American fascination with Egypt and its history. Primary Source documents can be found by browsing the Historical Sources page or by searching through the advanced search page. Secondary literature that addresses topics such as art & architecture, history, literature, religion, and science can be browsed through the scholarship page. The web resources page contains a list of helpful websites related to the topics of the site and the search page is an advanced
Historical Thinking Matters
For too many Americans, the history class in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (remember the teacher’s plaintive question, “anyone, anyone?”) is all too familiar. Our approach is meant to challenge this false and familiar image of history: understanding and reconstructing the past requires ways of thinking, reading, and questioning much more engaging and challenging than mere memorization.
Teaching in a way that differs from your own schooling experience is not necessarily easy to imagine, let a
Object of History
The Object of History is a cooperative project between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. The project was conceived of in an effort to find a low cost way for students and teacher of U.S. History to have access to the museum’s collections and the expertise of the curators. As a result the materials on the site are designed to improve students’ content knowledge of standard topics in U.S. History and to imp
World History Survey Course on the Web
World History teachers face many challenges to incorporating primary sources in their teaching—the pressures of coverage in survey courses, the lack of available materials, and inadequate training in dealing with unfamiliar sources from a range of cultures. World History Sources responds to these challenges (as well as the new opportunities offered by the Internet) by creating a website to help world history teachers and students locate, analyze, and learn from online primary sources and to fu
Women in World History
Women in World History is an online curriculum resource center designed to help high school and college world history teachers and students find and analyze online primary sources on women in world history. Materials encourage teachers to integrate recent scholarship and give students a more sophisticated framework for understanding global women’s history. Women in World History reflects three approaches central to current scholarship in world history and the history of women: an emphasis on
Making the History of 1989: The Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe
Making the History of 1989 materials were developed because teachers and their students have little access to vivid historical documents in English that convey the epochal events of 1989. Project materials utilize recent advances in our understanding of how historical learning takes place, including complex interaction with sources, recursive reading, and skills used by historians.
The site has three key features: a substantial collection of high quality primary sources; a set of multimedia int
Hindsight
Welcome to Hindsight, an online history project that will transport you back to New York City on May 8, 1970. Your mission is to determine what happened on that day, and what meaning it might hold for us today. Our site uses the web's characteristics to foster historical inquiry -- you will navigate through multiple sources of evidence, explore diverse perspectives, and make connections within this "web" of material. The site is part archive, part essay, and part interactive exhibit.
DoHistory
This site invites you to explore the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past. It is an experimental, interactive case study based on the research that went into the book and film A Midwife’s Tale, both based upon the remarkable diary of 18th-century midwife/healer Martha Ballard. Although DoHistory is centered on the life of Martha Ballard, you can learn basic skills and techniques for interpreting fragments that survive from any period in history.
Performance through character development
Students will use the creative elements of character analysis and improvisation to develop a character for performance. While this unit's theme is the development of characters for performance, its overarching goal is to provide French immersion students with the opportunity to extend their discourse and further develop their speaking skills. This unit does not cover articulation or pronunciation exercises. For this reason these elements of performance are not being evaluated in the unit assessm
Statistics
This course introduces students to the basic concepts, logic, and issues involved in statistical reasoning. Major topics include exploratory data analysis, an introduction to research methods, probability, and statistical inference. The objectives of this course are to give students confidence in manipulating and drawing conclusions from data and provide them with a critical framework for evaluating study designs and results. An important feature of the course is the use of an intelligent tutori
Hands on the Land Teaching Materials
Hands on the Land (HOL) is a network of field classrooms stretching across America from Alaska to Florida. HOL is sponsored by Partners in Resource Education, a collaboration of five Federal agencies, a non-profit foundation, schools, and other private sector partners. Public lands comprise approximately one-third of the acreage of the U.S., and you'll soon see they are rich in historical, archaeological and environmental learning opportunities. Through the HOL network of field classrooms, Feder
Public Lands: America's Largest Classroom
Are you looking for new ways to increase your students' interest and achievement in science, mathematics, and reading? Is student motivation suffering in your classroom? Why not consider taking your teaching outside? Studies have shown that using the environment as a learning tool not only increases student achievement but also helps students develop lifelong learning skills and a greater sense of respect and responsibility.
If this approach sounds intriguing, consider the Hands on the Land prog
Wildland Fire Primer
This Wildland Fire Primer is intended to serve as an outline for educators interested in teaching students about wildland fire. Fire and its management can be intimidating subjects for those with little or no knowledge of wildland fire issues. The background information provided in this Primer and related curriculum materials will enable educators to feel comfortable discussing wildland fire topics, and assist them in bringing these important topics into the classroom. This Primer has five areas
Whippo Problem Space
What! You haven't ever seen a Whippo? What about a Whammel? Well, how do you think that whales evolved? Which mammals do you think are their closest living relatives? Trying to make sense of whale evolution is a great place to engage in some evolutionary reasoning and look closely at the way scientists work through difficult historical problems. By the way, the term Whippo is used as a sort of shorthand for the hypothesis that whale and hippos represent sister groups—that is, they are each oth
