Resource Database
For those of you familiar with our work, you probably know about our K-12 education programs and our professional development work. We’re now working on bringing that work into a publicly accessible resource database. I won’t ramble on about all of the technical details (which I could), but thought it might be an interesting platform to talk about where we are.
Currently we’re interviewing teachers to see how they use primary documents, worksheets, focus questions and the like to see if we can use our database to perhaps fulfill a niche. It seems to use that there’s a lot of great resources out there that accomplish parts of the goal, but not the whole thing. For example, the National Parks site, courtesy of PBS allows teachers to make a page highlighting passages from primary documents and images creating a “scrapbook” page. Kind of fun, and an interesting application, but hardly provides a full educational framework. Â The Monticello classroom allows teachers to create a webpage which amalgamates resources and activities in a centralized place, allowing students to go through and perform activities in a certain order or view documents. Though its important to emphasize the way teachers can make content their own, we have to figure out how people find the resources we have, and Calisphere’s search features provide alternatives for “search based” users and “theme based” users: truly the best of both worlds.
Right now, we’re collecting some data and trying to combine two things we do well: professional development and web implementations of history, and try to make the “killer app.” I know, a lofty goal, but we think we can pull it off.
If you’re a teacher, or just interested in history on the web, we invite you to fill out our survey, and stay tuned to Now and Then and our site for future updates on the Resource Database.
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