Using the Library of Congress’ American Memory Collection
It has been said many times that students today are much more “visual learners” than students of earlier days. I don’t know if that’s really true, but I’ve altered my teaching to add a lot more visual material.
So maybe you’re teaching your kids how to compose an analytical History paper. (Let’s assume you’re teaching upper elementary or middle school social studies.) It’s always a big issue to find something everyone can write about. Here’s an idea:
First, schedule your class into the computer lab for a couple of days in a row for 30-45 minutes each time.
On the first day take them to this website: (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html)
And have them browse the collections. You may want to provide a study guide on which they note what they’ve seen, or one that requires them to find some particular item in each of the collections. The idea is to sort of force them to browse the site.
When you get them back to the classroom, help them compose a research question based on the collections. For instance, “How did Native Americans dress in the time period from 1860 to 1920,” or “What can we learn about baseball between 1860 and 1920?” (These are just off-the-cuff examples. You can come up with much better ones, I’m sure.)
Then, on the second day, take the kids back to the computer lab and have them browse the relevant collections, take notes on what they find, and download a couple of images to support their conclusions.
Posted by Jim Vandergriff