 I'm glad everyone could make it to today's DoxTeach session, our fourth series, and we're really going to be focusing today on choosing an activity, and we'll get right into that. Now, if you don't know what DoxTeach is, that this is your first session that you're attending, DoxTeach is the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives. This is the fourth in our series of webinars, and we actually are going to be extending more, but so far we've talked about assigning activities, finding activities, finding primary sources. Today's focus is really on choosing an activity, how to find the type of activity that really fits in with the skills that you're focusing on, that really fits in with your current needs, how you're teaching in the current remote learning, distance learning environment, and I'm thinking when I'm thinking about choosing an activity, I'm thinking whether it's you're going to be creating your own activity, modifying an activity, or using an activity that the National Archives educators have created or another educator has created, so finding that right type of activity that works for you. We'll be getting into modifying and creating activities in our next two webinar topics, and I'm sure we'll get to that near the end as well, but today is really broader to kind of explore the different types of activities that the National Archives has, what skills they focus on, and how you can use them with your students. Okay, so this is DoxTeach.org, and we're going to start by looking at the activity tools, all the different tools that DoxTeach has just by clicking on menu, activity tools, and all tools, and this brings up a page that describes the 12 different types of activities, kind of templates in which you can put primary sources into to share with your students. It's essentially, even though there are 12 different types, whenever I share the website with teachers, I kind of share the fact that it's really two broad categories you can break it down into, and for lack of a better term, shorter activities, activities that in the typical classroom environment might be good for a short formative assessment to a do now, or your beginning activity in a class, or a unit, or something you would do at the end of a class period, and then the longer activities, which might be the entire unit, or the entire lesson, or even multiple day lesson, and in our current environment, obviously that gets changed around a little bit, but it still makes sense to kind of divide it into shorter and longer activities. So the shorter activities are all ones that involve just one or maybe two different documents, primary sources, and most of them are here right at the top of this list, the analyzing documents tool just involves one primary source, and if you're really focusing on building that analysis skill in students, it's pretty appropriate for that. Then a lot of the other ones that are kind of the shorter activities fall under this umbrella term of focusing on the details. We have focusing on the details discussion topic where you just put up a document and put a question below it for students to think about or comment. Kind of similar to this comparing contrast, the only difference is here you have two documents that you want students to kind of look for similarities and differences between and kind of have a dialogue with each other, the two documents, and then you have focusing on detail spotlight, zoom crop, and white out black out, which start to modify documents a little bit in some ways by either highlighting certain information, which is what the spotlight tool does, obscuring some information, the white out blackout tool, or literally cropping it down, zooming into a small portion, the zoom crop tool, and these all kind of require students to focus on particular details, to really kind of build up their analysis skills, but also to try to figure out what it is the document it is that they're looking at, and to try to pull out particular facts, particular dates, and information to really understand that particular document. I'm going to show one of these styles in a second. The last one that only uses a handful of documents is here at the bottom interpreting data, which is pretty powerful if you're looking at charts or graphs or tables, and you want your students to really interpret that historical information. A lot of teachers also use this for kind of putting, because you can put little annotations and questions on the document, they use this for political cartoons and other types of records too. But all those focusing on the details activities use only one or at most two primary sources and some really basic questions. And in today's environment, when we're doing so much work using Zoom or Google Meets and different technologies, these might be activity types where you could literally demonstrate directly in front of your students. This might be one where they have another tab open, they're doing the activity while they're on a meeting with you or it could be a short homework assignment. Everything seems like homework now, but short homework assignment before you have a discussion about it in class the next day. I'm going to show you two of these types of activities to kind of give you a sense of what they look like as a student. This is the teacher kind of tool description page about it. It lets you know a little bit about the particular type of activity. It gives you a learning objectives if you really want for this analyzing documents tool, if you want them to internalize the process of analyzing primary source documents, this is a pretty helpful tool to be able to do that. I'm just going to go in to kind of show you what one of these activities looks like. Which one did I want to show? Yeah. This is the teacher page for it. It kind of gives you a sense of what level it's thought to be for, what grade level, how step by step, how to do it in the classroom, even an approximate time you might need for it. But as a student, or if you were projecting this via Zoom or Google meets or something, this is how it would look to students doing the activity. So you have here a document. The title of this activity for students is What is the Highly Secret Matter? And there's instructions here. Take a minute to examine the document and answer the questions that follow. And you can zoom in here. You can see this is a letter from the War Department to the president talking about that they have to have a meeting to discuss something that's very important. If you're studying this time period, World War II era in the classroom, this could be helpful content-wise. But then the rest of the activity, this is a digital version of our tried and true document analysis worksheets. So you can see questions here where students could look at the document, if they're doing it completely remotely, check off information, describe it, etc. If you were just sharing it with your students for a Google Hangout, you might provide the questions to them in another means and kind of walk through the actual activity. But it's a fairly short activity both to physically do in front of your students. But also if you were to create an activity like this, it only involves picking a primary source. And then all of these questions, except for a couple that we added that are kind of content specific to this particular question, all these questions are all populated by the form itself. So a lot of teachers use this that they're getting their students to do really basic primary source analysis. And it's a good starter for that or even needs to kind of build that skill. That's really the focus you want to do in the activity. Or if you only have a short amount of time that you really want to engage your students in it. So that's the analyzing documents tool. I'm going to close these windows and go back here to that tool page. I want to show one more of the shorter types of activities to give you a sense of what they look like. And if this one is a tool called Zoom Crop where you take an image, you take a map, you take some document, usually I would say more often than not visual. And obscure some of the information, only show a small part of it to have your students really focus their attention and try to find clues or details that might help them understand what that entire document is. And they might end up noticing things that they wouldn't have noticed if they were not looking at just that small part of the document. So I'm going to bring up this activity and share it to you as if you're doing it with your students. This is one that might be more appropriate for elementary school age students. But you have here finding American symbols. There's a prompt here. You will see just one part of the picture. What do you see? What do you think it represents? After you've answered, guess what the whole picture will be when we switch the views. You have this image here. And I've done this with students in the classroom. And they will look at things. They'll see it looks like a bird. They see some letters. They see some stars or something above the head. They don't have the entire document. But then when they click on switch the view, they get the entire, in this case, the great seal of the U.S. And if you were teaching about symbols, if you were teaching, you know, even this is a great tool to use with political cartoons or photographs and you want them to focus their attention on a small aspect of it before seeing the entire image. And I guess I didn't mention this in the last activity. But just like before, we've talked about this last week with how you can actually get the work that your students are doing. So if they were doing this as a homework assignment, or if you were doing this not displaying it to them, but they were doing it on their own, there is a follow up question here. They can type in their name, email address, send you a response that could go straight to your email when you have an account at DocsTeach. Or you can even set it up as sharing the whole activity via Google Classroom or whatever other learning management system that you use. And there's a whole other 15 minute webinar that focuses on that, that is up on our YouTube page and is here on DocsTeach as well. But if you have these types of activities, again, the shorter activities for lack of a better term, if you just want to build a particular skill of analysis, if you want to be able to present things to your students, they only involve one document. If you want to modify or create your own, they're fairly easy to get started with. And we're going to share some of that information in our next two webinar sessions later this month that we'll get into creating and modifying activities. But since they only use one document, they're fairly easy to do that. The other activity types are the ones that involve a bigger group of primary sources. And they focus on other kind of higher order skills for the most part. I'm going to show one of these. But we are finding a sequence where students are asked to placed primary sources in the correct chronological order or to understand a sequence, a process that has first, second, third, etc. a step. So students have to look for dates and other information. These types of activities, as you're going to see, are not ones that I think really work for you to literally do with your entire classroom for the first time in a Zoom or Google Hangout. This might be a longer term assignment. If you're assigning activities, that might take longer chunks of time. And then maybe on another day, you're kind of going over their choices in a Google Hangout or a Zoom meeting. This works for that. So students are more working on their own and you're kind of reviewing things later. So, you know, some of these like making connections is kind of see how a string of documents relate to each other. It's really good for DBQ style prep. If you have AP students, that lesson will be go away or so from the AP test. But even if you're working with your students and you want them to understand how primary sources connect to each other, that might not seem as connected as they do. Mapping history, seeing how events occur geographically across the country around the world. Seeing the big picture, which I'll show an example of in a second. And weighing the evidence is great for argument writing. If you want your students to kind of look at an argument and see how different primary sources help support one side or another in that historical argument. But the one I want to share with you now is from seeing the big picture, which if you are having your students review a topic that you've focused on in the past few weeks or even the whole year, it's pretty good for a review style game or as a summative assessment if you really want them to take a big concept and make those connections to it. It's essentially a matching activity where students are expected to match a document to an appropriate description or another document. And there are activities here that go under this one tool from very low elementary school age students all the way up to high school AP students. I want to show one in particular, an oldie, but goodie, the Constitution at work. Again, as your students would see it, and you'll see right away that this might not be an activity that you could display for the first time with your students, though it could be something you would review with them. But here you have an array of primary source documents and different parts of the U.S. Constitution and students are asked to match that document to the appropriate part of the Constitution. They can click on the bottom part of the document and it brings up the entire image. In this case, a drawing for a game board that looks kind of a forerunner of monopoly. The students would look at that and then look for the part of the Constitution that relates to it. Not sure if people can see this kind of the pop-ups aren't showing up all the time, but I clicked on the enlarge this window and it says Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries. So that's the copyright slash patent protection that the Constitution provides Congress to do if you guys can see that window. Then they click on the document, they click on that description, they click on the document, and it causes those two matched pairs to disappear. So students might do this activity, you assign it to them, they do it on their own or in small groups who knows how they're talking to each other, and then they will send you their responses that in this question, what are some of the major themes or big ideas found in the Constitution? But maybe you would review it during your distance learning system using Google Hangout or Zoom or whatever you're using in the classroom. But this type of activity and really all of the ones that are under that umbrella term of the longer activities, the ones that use a wide array of primary sources don't really work, I think, for the first time when you're sharing it directly with your students. So that's kind of a quick way going through thinking about what these different activity types are before we turn it over to questions. I know this was seen earlier in finding activities, but if you're looking for a particular activity on a particular topic, just by clicking on menu and activities brings up the search page for it. And you can actually, besides just typing in particular terms, you can just look for particular types of activities, like if you want to see all the analyzing documents activities, you can do that. If you want to focus on a particular skill, like you're really interested in chronological thinking, you can turn that filter on, I'm going to close out the analyzing documents filter, and you'll see activities that really do that as well. And, you know, obviously these are activity types that you can put in all different types of primary sources. You can modify things that we've created or other teachers have created, and we'll get to that over the next few weeks in these webinar series.