 Welcome to Getting Started with DocsTeach Modifying Existing Activities. On docsteach.org, you can borrow from an ever-expanding collection of document-based activities built by the National Archives Education staff and teachers around the world. In this session, you'll discover why and how to modify an activity you find on DocsTeach to better suit your needs. Some of the reasons why you may choose to modify an activity could include making an activity more rigorous, adding additional scaffolding for students. Perhaps you want to customize an activity to better suit the needs of specific students or classes. You can change the length of an activity. You can connect an activity to an essential question that your students are exploring, or just add custom student instructions. You can make these changes by adding, removing or swapping documents, or changing the instructions on the student page. But let's take a look at an example of how you can do this. I've already found an activity that I'd like to edit today, so I'm going to select menu, my account, my activities. And I should mention I am logged into my DocsTeach account, so the features we're seeing now are things you're only going to be able to access if you're logged in to your free DocsTeach account. Here's an activity I want us to take a look at, the amendment process ratifying the 19th Amendment. This takes us to the teacher page. We can see that in this activity, students are going to analyze the historical records of Congress and the U.S. government to understand the sequence of steps in the amendment process. Clicking on star activity takes us to the student page. And here we have several documents that students are instructed to place in the correct sequence. A couple of things I want to point out on this activity, when we click on a document to take a closer look at it, you'll see in this case there's no additional contextual information. We just have the document citation. I also want to point out how this activity also has hints available for students to use as they work on sequencing these documents. And then, of course, at the bottom we have the when you're done section, some wrap up questions for students to consider after they've completed the sequence. There are a couple of ways we might want to modify this existing activity. For example, this petition dates to 1917. Maybe we want to bring in an older petition that helps students think about the decades-long fight for an amendment extending suffrage to women. Or maybe we want to bring in a little local history by bringing in a petition from suffragists in the state where you live. To make either one of these changes, we would want to go back to the teacher page and select the icon for copying this activity for editing. You'll then open a drop-down menu and this is where you can choose a classroom to save this activity or to copy this activity. I'm going to choose my in-development folder. I like to have a folder where I keep all the activities I'm currently working on. And then I'll select Add. This now redirects us to the My Activities page. And here's the original activity that we saw before by the National Archives Education Team. It's published. And then when we scroll down to my in-development folder, we can now see we've got a copy version of that activity. It's no longer published and we now have the option to edit and manage this activity. So I'm going to select that button, which takes us to the interface for editing your activities. Now, we recommend when you make a copy of an activity that you do go ahead and give it a unique title, especially if you're going to be publishing your new activity to make it stand out and distinguish it from the existing activity. It can be a simple change. We're going to call this one making the 19th Amendment. The student and the teacher titles can be the same. They can be different. You'll also see we have the option at the top here to publish this activity. We're not going to do that yet because we're still working on it. That's where you'll be able to publish it and add your author name. If you do want students to be able to complete your activity online, eventually you will need to publish it. But right now, we're going to focus on making those changes. The Overview tab gives us an overview of some step-by-step instructions for how to create this activity. We're going to go to Add Elements. We're going to go ahead and save this activity because it's always a good idea to save any time you make a big change. Here on this page, we can see the different documents included in this activity. We also can see an option to enable document details. I pointed out earlier how the petition only had the citation information. If we wanted to include additional contextual information available on Doc's Teach for that document, we could make that change by selecting Full Document Details. Just another way to consider how you might modify existing activities for your students. I'm going to select this letter to Edwin Webb, and I'm going to go down to this drop-down menu that says Take Selected Items, and I'm going to remove them because this is the petition I want to swap out. Next, I'm going to select Add Activity Element, which has a drop-down menu where we can either find a new document or upload an image. For the finding a sequence activity, you can upload outside images. We just ask that they're in the public domain. However, I'm going to add another document from Doc's Teach. Now, from here, I could browse documents and find one to add, but whenever I work on a new activity, I like to save my documents in advance, so I already have one in mind. I'll click Menu, My Account, My Documents, and in my Default Holder, I've saved a petition from 1867. I'm just going to take another look at this petition, make sure it's the correct one. I could choose to add this whole document to my activity, but I want to really just focus on the first page. I'm going to go ahead and add just the first page to making the 19th Amendment by clicking that plus sign by the first page icon and then clicking Add. Then I am good to go, so I'm going to return to the activity. We can now see the petition that I've added at the bottom of this sequence. Now, since the sequencing is important here, the order is important, I'm going to go ahead and select this petition and drag it to the first position because that's the order where this document would fall in the sequence when the students complete this activity. All right, I'm going to go ahead and save these changes, and then we'll go to Setup to see if there are any additional changes I need to make. On the Setup page, for finding a sequence, you'll find this is where we can add those additional hints. For a purely chronological sequence, maybe you want to remove the hints completely. In this case, they might be helpful, so we'll go ahead and add a similar hint to what was there for the previous petition. Desire for an amendment is voiced, petitioning Congress. And then again, we're going to go ahead and save. The next tab for students, this is where we can edit the introductory instructions for students. This is where we can enter the conclusion text if we want to edit the wrap of questions for students to consider and submit after they finish sequencing these documents. I'm not going to make any changes here. The spirit of the activity hasn't changed too much. The instructions are going to stay the same. And then we're going to want to go to Preview. Here we have an opportunity to preview the student activity, make sure the student page looks the way we want it to. And then we can see the snapshot. This is what comes up on the Teacher page. It gives us a little preview of the activity. It's what you see when you do a search for activities. But we're going to go ahead and do a new snapshot because that old snapshot has the old petition on it. So it takes a few seconds, but then we have our new snapshot with our new petition. So we'll go ahead and save and move on to the last step. Now, when we go to the For Teacher section, you'll see the teacher instructions haven't automatically transferred over. You're welcome to go back and copy and paste from the original instructions, but there may be some adjustments you need to make. For example, the teacher instructions reference the earlier petition, and we might want to swap in information about the new petition. Or depending on how many changes we've made, add some additional teacher instructions. This is where you'll also need to tag the historical era, the historical thinking skill, the Bloom's Taxonomy level, and the grade level for this activity. Once you've made those changes, you can save it and decide if you're ready to publish it. If you're still working on your activity, no worries, you don't need to do this all in one setting. You can always save and close. So that's an example of how you can just swap out one document, swap in a new document, but we could have taken this new, the same activity, the amendment process, and brought in a whole new set of documents. For example, this looked at the 19th amendment, but in my documents I put together a selection of documents that could show that same process for the 26th amendment. So you could use that same framework, tweak those student instructions to reflect a different process for a different amendment. Other reasons why you may swap a document could be perhaps you want to swap in, maybe an activity uses a petition in cursive and you want to swap in a petition that's been typed. Maybe you want to shorten the length of an activity and really have students just focus on analyzing a couple of core documents, or maybe you want an activity to really focus on a specific time period. For example, in the How Have Americans Responded to Immigration Weighing Evidence Activity, we have 18 different documents that look at immigration from 1790 to about 2006. So we could go ahead and make a copy of this activity and remove documents to have students really focus on maybe responses to immigration in the 20th century. So that's another example of why you might want to change documents in an activity. Another way to customize existing activities is to think about making changes to the student instructions, introducing the activity, or the when you're done section. Perhaps you want to make connections to information you've covered in class, add additional scaffolding to the instructions, or want students to use an activity as a jumping off point for additional analysis. For example, if we look at this contrast activity, on the student page, we'll see that students are going to analyze three different political cartoons and think about how they show the constitutional process of taking office for these different members of government. And there are a couple of changes we want. We might want to make. For example, here, students are going to reference different articles of the Constitution. Maybe we want to copy and paste the excerpts from the Constitution right into the student instructions and ask students to match each of these political cartoons to those sections of the Constitution. Maybe in the introductory text, we want to add some additional step-by-step instructions for analyzing a political cartoon. And in the when you're done section, maybe we want to add another step where students go and find a more modern political cartoon and connect it back to the constitutional process of taking office. A couple of different ways to modify instructions to make those changes. We'd go back to the teacher page, copy the activity for editing, and then we'll see we've got a new version, that new copy version, go into edit and manage the activity. And here we're not changing the elements, but we do want to make some changes to the setup. So for example, on this activity to change the discussion text underneath the three political cartoons, we're going to want to update that optional discussion text. Maybe we want to make some changes here. Or maybe we just want to make changes to the four students' intro or concluding text. So you can make those changes, save that activity, publish it if it's something you want your students to be able to complete online, and then you're good to go. Those are just two examples of how you can edit an existing activity. However, for each of our different activity tools, you'll find different ways to customize and tweak existing activities. So the best way to familiarize yourself with this process is to try it. Find an activity, copy it for editing, and play around with it. And if you have additional questions, you can always reach out to us on the Contact Us button on docsteach.org. We can't wait to see what you all come up with.