NewseumED.org is an educational website that aims to promote media literacy and critical thinking among students and educators. It offers a diverse range of interactive resources, primary sources, and lesson plans centered around media, journalism, and First Amendment issues. Through its engaging content and tools, NewseumED.org empowers students to become informed and responsible citizens in an ever-evolving media landscape.
The Learning Network is a website that features news content from The New York Times tuned for teacher use and classroom discussion. There’s a host of features, many updated regularly, including daily lessons, a word of the day, writing and thinking prompts based on images or graphs, contests, and quizzes. – Commonsense.org
The Zinn Education Project is a resource hub dedicated to promoting the teaching of people’s history in classrooms. It provides a collection of lesson plans, articles, and teaching materials inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn. Educators can access a wide range of resources that challenge traditional narratives and explore marginalized perspectives in history. The website encourages critical thinking, empathy, and civic engagement among students.
Docsteach.org is a website created by the National Archives that offers a range of educational resources for teaching history. It features ready-to-use document-based activities and lesson plans with detailed teacher guides. It serves as a valuable resource for teachers looking to incorporate primary sources into their history curriculum and foster historical inquiry among students.
Research centers at Stanford Graduate School of Education develop a variety of free resources to support the work of PK–12 educators and teacher educators. Explore the resources listed and visit the research center sites to find a variety of quality teaching materials.
Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are. The Civic Online Reasoning (COR) curriculum from Stanford provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.
The “Reading Like a Historian” and “Beyond the Bubble” sections of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) provide innovative approaches to history education. “Reading Like a Historian” offers a collection of historical documents accompanied by lesson plans that help students develop historical analysis skills through document-based investigations. “Beyond the Bubble” provides online assessments that assess students’ historical thinking skills through short, interactive exercises. It offers a platform for teachers to gauge students’ abilities to analyze and interpret historical evidence in a digital format.
Facing History offers lesson plans, multimedia materials, teaching strategies, and readings that focus on topics such as history, social justice, and human rights. Teachers can utilize these resources to engage students in critical thinking, empathy-building, and understanding of historical events and their impact on society.
Educating for American Democracy (EAD) offers curriculum frameworks, inquiry-based lesson plans, entire unit plans, games, interactives, assessments, and more. Educators can access these resources to enhance their teaching of civics, history, and social studies, with a focus on developing students’ civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions. The materials provided by EAD aim to support educators in preparing students to be informed and engaged participants in American democracy.
Annenberg Classroom’s free resources include over 65 videos on constitutional concepts and Supreme Court cases as well as games, lesson plans, timelines, downloadable books, a glossary, and a Constitution guide.
