Social Studies Resources
For Secondary Teachers

 

Annenberg Making Civics Real: A Workshop for Teachers
Making Civics Real is a video workshop for high school civics teachers. It includes eight one-hour video programs, a print guide to the workshop activities, and an accompanying Web site.Each of the eight programs presents authentic teachers in diverse school settings modeling constructivist teaching strategies.The goal of this workshop is to give teachers new resources and ideas to reinvigorate civic education.

Annenberg Primary Sources: Workshops in American History
In this workshop, 12 high school history teachers explore the use of primary-source documents in the research and interpretation of American history. The programs feature informal lectures by prominent historians on pivotal events from the settlement of Jamestown to the Korean conflict and the Cold War. The teachers are led in discussions, debates, interviews, and role-playing as they investigate the original documents that “transmit the voices of America’s past.” Teachers will find that the activities in this workshop can be adapted and used in their own classrooms. The topics relate to programs from Annenberg/CPB’s instructional series, A Biography of America, which can be viewed in coordination with this workshop.

The Avalon Project
This site contains hundreds of historical documents in digital format relevant to the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy and government.

Best of History Web Sites
This site contains “annotated links to over 1000 history web sites as well links to hundreds of quality K-12 history lesson plans, history teacher guides, history activities, history games, history quizzes, and more throughout its pages.”

Center for History and New Media
The Center for History and New Media uses digital media and computer technology to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. There are more than a dozen digital history projects, free tools, and resources for teachers and historians. The Projects section includes History Matters, World History Matters, and Teaching American History, which teachers will find most useful.

Civil War Treasures from the New York Historical Society
This site from the Library of Congress offers materials for teaching about the Civil War. It includes recruitment posters, sketches, photos, a prison camp newspaper, and letters Walt Whitman wrote to wounded servicemen. Special sections examine the 1860 election, secession, war, African Americans in the Civil War, and recruitment and conscription.

CNN Student News
This resource from CNN provides daily online news broadcasts for students and lesson materials to accompany the broadcasts. Highlights of the materials include transcripts and discussion questions.

Constitution Toolkit
This site from the Library of Congress includes images of newspaper articles (1787), notes Washington and Jefferson wrote on drafts of the Constitution (1787-88), Jefferson's chart of state votes (1788), Washington's diaries (1786-89), Hamilton's speech notes for proposing a plan of government, a Philadelphia map (1752), the "broadside" Bill of Rights (1791), and other artifacts.

Cyberschoolbus: United Nations
This site provides teachers and students with information and teaching materials pertaining to international issues. There are four main sections of which teachers will find Curriculum most useful. It contains thematic units with interactive exercises.

Digital History
This site is an excellent resource in the study of American History for both teachers and students. Contents include a multimedia textbook, historical documents, essays, classroom handouts, multimedia exhibitions, maps, and audio/visual archives. Teachers should not miss the Interactive Timeline and Do History Through sections.

EconEdLink
"Developed by the National Council on Economic Education, EconEdLink provides teachers and students with lessons and classroom learning activities based on economics topics in the news and real-time economics data. EconEdLink content is designed to help integrate economic concepts across the curriculum as outlined in the Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics." --MarcoPolo Fact Sheet

Famous Trials
This site is a collection of transcripts, pictures, audio clips, resource links, articles, and editorial cartoons to aid in teaching and learning about more than 50 famous trials throughout history.

History/Social Studies for K-12 Teachers
This site is contains resources which are divided into 28 different categories to encourage social studies teachers to use the Internet as a tool for teaching and learning. Highlighted sections include Diversity, New, and Creative Applications. This site may be slow to load due to interactive content.

Humanities Interactive
This site contains seven categories of museum-quality multimedia exhibits. There are online slideshows, essays, teaching guides, learning activities, and interactive games for each exhibit.

iEARN
This site contains more than 160 projects to encourage students to "engage in responsible social activism and grow in their knowledge of important issues in the world community." There are more than 15,000 schools participating in this project. Teachers can select specific projects to fit classroom needs, curriculum, and schedule.

Internet 4 Classrooms Social Studies
This online database from Internet4Classrooms.com is an annotated collection of 50 websites for secondary social studies.

The Learning Page...Especially for Teachers
The Library of Congress provides this page as an educator’s guide to its American Memory collection, which is “an online archive of more than 100 collections of rare and unique items of American heritage. There are lesson plans, activities, and interactive games as well as numerous multimedia resources.

National Atlas
Nationalatlas.gov is a primary source of U.S. maps and geographic information. Zoom in on your state and make your own map by selecting features to display: cities and counties, roads and rivers, population and 109th congressional districts, crops and livestock, amphibians and butterflies, air and water quality, earthquakes and land cover, forest types, and more. Print a U.S. map (with or without names of states and capitals). Find an aerial photo of your neighborhood.

National Geographic Education Guide
This site is a collection of National Geographic's educational sites. The main topics include lesson plans, Maps & Photos, Professional Development Opportunities, and Current Events. There are two methods to search the resources, keyword and Find Resources. Highlights include the Map Machine in Maps and Geography located on the Maps & Photos page, the Xpeditions site, and links to all four National Geographic magazines.

National Geographic XPeditions
"Developed by the National Geographic Society, Xpeditions brings rich, standards-based geography content to teachers and students. This site includes materials for K-12 teachers and students and their families, including an interactive atlas with over 1,600 printable maps and Xpedition Hall, a virtual learning museum with exhibits aligned to the U.S. National Geography Standards." --MarcoPolo Fact Sheet

Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Photogravures
This site from the Library of Congress provides teaching materials for learning from newspaper images about the Great War. Features include a timeline, events and statistics, pictorial highlights, the Lusitania disaster, pictures as propaganda, chronological thinking, analyzing photos and captions, themes in literature, posters, and ads.

SCORE: History/Social Science
This site from the Schools of California Online Resources for Education provides resources and activities applicable to any school curriculum. There are over 3500 web resource links and over 1200 lessons and activities. Highlights include the virtual projects and field trips and the easy to use grade-level search feature.

Suggested Web Sites for Constitution Day and Citizenship Day
These sites are excellent resources for teaching about the consitution, a required topic on September 17 in all schools that receive federal funds.

Women of Protest
This site from the Library of Congress entitled Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party presents 448 photos documenting the National Woman's Party's push for ratification of the 19th Amendment and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Taken from 1875-1922, these photos include portraits of leaders and tactics used by the organization -- picketing, pageants, parades, demonstrations, and hunger strikes.