offering teachers and students frictionless access to primary source historical documents, tools...
TRANSCRIPT
Offering teachers and students frictionless access to primary source historical
documents, tools that enable them to construct compelling personal narratives
using those resources, and scaffolding to help develop historical thinking skills
Primary Source Documents
Help develop better historical thinking skills
Help develop a sense of historical perspective
Help develop evaluation skills
Help engage students in the “doing of history”
Historical Narratives
An active method of using primary sources
Short digital movie (1-3 minutes)
Explores some historical question
A montage of primary source images
Students narrate the movie in their own voice
An example
Very engaging way for students to explore history
PrimaryAccess: A Web Application
A web-based tool that scaffolds the entire activity
Access to the primary source resources
Access to historical context information
Integrated historical narrative tools:
Word processor
Voice recorder
Movie editor
Designed to be used by middle and high-school students
Developed in partnership with primary source holders
1. Teacher sets up an activity using resources provided by some of the PrimaryAccess partners, or they can use their own resources.
2. Student looks through the primary source materials the teacher has made available, which can be:
Photographs
Drawings
Newspaper
Documents
3. Student begins to write narration and adds the primary source documents to illustrate that script using the internal word processor in PrimaryAccess webapp.
Rather than a timeline in a typical movie editor, the words form the timing for the movie.
4. The student records a reading of the narration in their own voice using the internal voice recorder provided by the primaryAccess webapp.
5. Motion is easily added to make the still images come alive, as Ken Burns does in his documentaries.
6. The final movies can be viewed and shared from any computer with an internet connection.
They require no storage at the school’s computer and no special software to be loaded.
Current Status:
Funded under grant from DuPont Foundation
Over 9,000 students / 10,000 movies
Partnership with PrimarySourceLearning
Efficacy study in Northern Virginia
www.primaryaccess.org
Bill [email protected]