 Welcome everyone to Getting Started with Docs. Teach creating your own activity. This session will walk you through the process of adding primary sources, setting up your activity, writing instructions for your students, and publishing your activity to Docs Teach. We'll be putting together many of the skills we've covered in earlier sessions. So if you're new to this series, you can find the previously recorded webinars under menu, resources, webinars, and feel free to check out the full lineup of sessions later, especially the sessions on choosing an activity and finding and sharing primary source documents. When you create your own activity, you can start with a primary source document, or you can start with your activity template. There are 12 different activity templates to choose from. We're going to demonstrate starting with a document first. So I'm going to go to explore primary sources. I'm going to search for a primary source. I was looking at earlier this Pearl Harbor radar plot. Then when I open the primary source, and look at this top lineup of buttons, I have a couple of options here, and I'm going to choose this plus button that's going to add this primary source to an activity. I'm going to create a new activity and put this document in it. I'll select add. Now when I go to menu, my account, my activities, I'll now see this activity that I've just created. I should also mention I'm currently logged into my Docs Teach account, which is definitely the first step you'll want to take when it comes to creating an activity. Here's the activity I've just created on this date and time. It's not published, but I do have an option to edit and manage activity. So I'm going to go ahead and select that, which takes us to the interface to edit an activity. The first thing you're going to want to do is choose an activity type. For example, this Pearl Harbor radar plot might work well as an analyzing documents activity using the map document analysis questions. You're also going to want to add a student title and a teacher title. You're always welcome to come back and change this. If you're anything like me, I always like to save the title for last. But we'll go ahead and use this as a placeholder. The student and teacher titles can be different or the same. They should give you an idea of what this activity is all about. Then you need to save. This is going to generate the specific steps for creating the analyzing documents activity. What we're going to see on the overview tab once this finish is loading are the step-by-step instructions for how to complete this type of activity. First, we'll go to the add elements type. Here's the document that we've added to this activity available for use. From this tab, we could also, if we decided we wanted to swap out a different document, we could select this document and remove it from the activity. We could also go to add activity elements and find a different document on DocsTeach, or we have the option to upload an image from an outside source. We just ask that it's in the public domain. We also have the option to include the full document details, so some additional contextual information, or we get to choose just to make the document image available to our students. I'm going to go ahead and leave the full document details available for now. Then I'll just go ahead and save. I find it's always a good practice to save along every step of the way as you go through this process of putting your activity together. The next two steps are going to be very specific to the type of activity you're working on. Under Setup, we're going to select Configure Activity, Begin Setup, and this is we want to choose the document that we're presenting in this activity. We'll then have the option to crop this image or use the full image. I want to use the full image. Then we'll go ahead and save and move on to our next step. The Analyzing Documents Activity takes the National Archives document analysis questions and makes them available as basically a fillable form for your students. If you're familiar with our document analysis worksheets, these are those same questions available as a Docs Teach Activity. For the next step, we go to Analysis Questions. We want to choose our level. If it's for we have a set for younger students or a set for intermediate or secondary students, or set for those novice students or those learning English. We'll also want to choose the document type. In this case, we're going to use the map questions and select Save. This will then populate the questions from that document analysis worksheet. You'll also have the option to customize these questions. For example, you could select any of these questions and choose to hide them from the activity. You could add a question to this different section. It's really up to you. This is a page that's very specific to the Analyzing Documents Activity. The next step is where you are going to stay the same. For the different activity tools, it's where you would fill in the student instructions, the student conclusion, the teacher instructions, and we'll take a look at those steps next. However, I want to go back to the beginning and take a look at how these steps would change if we went with a different document analysis tool. So let's go back to Overview, and I want to change this to Interpreting Data, which is a great tool for when you're looking at a document with a lot of data. So I'm going to go ahead and change the tool type using that drop-down menu and then save it. We now have the instructions for how to create an interpreting data activity. When we go to Add Elements, this is the same thing. We're going to use the same document. But as we can already see from the tabs, the document analysis questions are no longer there, and when we go to the Setup tab, we're going to have a slightly different set of instructions. So in this case, for Configure the Activity, we have the option to include, consider the source questions for students to consider. These will ask, this is a series of questions that ask students things like, how do you think this data was collected? Who do you think created this document? We're going to include these questions. You also have the opportunity to add text to this document. The text that you add could add some additional clarification information. It could ask students questions about specific portions of this document. And to add text, you simply press the Add Text plus sign, then you click in the little question mark. You then get a text box that opens where you can add a specific question. So for example, we could ask, what does this stamp indicate about how this document was used? Save and close. And now your annotation is saved on this document for students to consider as they go through this activity. This is what the setup looks like for an interpreting data activity. Well, then of course, go ahead and save it. And then we'll move on and take a look at what the instructions look like for completing the four student sections and for teacher sections. So let's go back to our tabs, click for students. So here we have two text box where you can enter introduction text. In the introduction text, you want to write what students are going to see when they open this activity. You'll want to include any necessary historical context, give directions for what students, so students know what they need to do to complete this activity. You'll also want to enter a conclusion text. So is there a wrap up question you want students to consider as they complete this activity? Is there a last bit of analysis you want them to conduct and submit to you when they complete this activity? So you also have the opportunity to format the text. You can also include hyperlinks to other documents or websites if that's something that will be helpful for the activity you're creating. And then of course, we want to save. When we go to the preview page, this is where you'll be able to view the student activity as it currently appears for the students. So we can see we have the annotation question we added. We have the consider the source questions available for students to answer. And then when you're done is where we would add that wrap up conclusion text and then students would be able to submit their responses once you publish this activity and you'll be able to review the student's whole snapshot of this completed activity. But let's go back to the edit activity screen. In the interpreting data tool, students can also add their own annotations to the data that you're looking at. So that could be another instruction that you include for students to use to use that annotation tool to add additional comments on the document as they analyze it. You're also going to want to create a snapshot of your activity. This is the image that will appear in the activity search on the teacher page of this particular activity. So that will be generated by the work that you've created so far. And then on the for teachers page, this is where we're going to add a brief summary for teachers so they can get a quick look at what this activity is about, what it covers. It can be helpful to give teachers an idea of what to expect in this activity to see if it's something they want to use. You can also then add in the detailed instructions for teachers, things like where this activity could fit into the curriculum, why a teacher might want to use it. You can list the approximate time needed to complete this activity. You could note some instructions, whether it's meant to present this activity to the whole class or if this is better geared for students working in small groups or individually. You basically think of it as writing yourself notes for you to facilitate this activity or as if you were writing a lesson plan. You can also include links here to other documents. You can include historical background information that may be helpful, couple of things to consider as you write this section. I always recommend checking out an example created by the National Archives Education Team to get a look at what this section should look like. The last step you'll need to do is to label the appropriate historical era. It can also be an across historical era's label. You're going to want to match it to the historical thinking skill, Bloom's taxonomy level and intended grade level. And then you can always save and close your activity. If you want to take a break, come back to it and review it. Do some final editing. But once you're ready to publish this activity, you can go to where it says published, select yes, add your author name. And then this activity will be available on DocsTeach for other teachers who have created free DocsTeach accounts to use. You'll also be able to share it with students and then have them complete this activity online and review their sessions, review their answers in DocsTeach. And we have a whole nother webinar session that looks at assigning and viewing student work in DocsTeach. I'm going to go ahead and save and close this activity, though. And we can check out what a final edited version would look like. If I go to my activities, I have a final version of this activity here. So you can get a sense of the suggested teaching instructions that we've added some more annotations to this document. This gives us a look at what that final product looks like. Now one last thing I want to cover before we wrap up today's session is I mentioned you can also start with the activity template. In this case, we started with the document. Let's take a look at what this process looks like if you're adding multiple documents and if you start with an activity template. So I'm going to select create fun and engaging activities from the homepage. This takes us to our master list of activity tools, which gives us more information about the learning objectives for each of these tools, some suggested teaching instructions, and we'll help you think about which activity tool you want to use. Again, thinking about how do you want this to fit into your classroom? Is this an introduction? Is this a wrap up an assessment? Is this really going to focus on one particular document or story? In my head, I know I want to create a, see in the big picture, activity that matches the five freedoms of the First Amendment to real life examples. So I'm going to go ahead and at the top of this page, select create a new activity. It takes us again to that edit activity interface. And then I can select my activity type. So I want to do that, see in the big picture. Again, making sure we have a title, which you can always change later. And then we're going to go ahead and save it to make sure we generate those instructions specific to the see in the big picture activity. And we have the instructions right here that walk you through these different steps. We're going to start with adding elements, just like we started with our other activity that we took a look at. Here we haven't added any documents yet. So we're going to select add activity element documents. This is going to pull from docs teach. We could do a search right here of documents and add them directly to our activity. So for example, I want to pull in a copy of the bill of rights. I'm going to open that document, select the plus sign. It already has pulled up the activity I'm working on and select add. I can also, I can go back to the activity here if I was ready to move on or when I'm working on a document that use or an activity that uses many documents, I like to pull my documents together in advance and kind of plan out where I want the activity to go. So if I go to menu, my account, my documents, I can find a folder where I've already saved several documents that show the freedoms of the First Amendment in action. I could select each of these documents and then select take select items and add them to the activity we're currently working on. So the First Amendment in action or I could individually review the documents and add them that way. One thing to note is if you add documents in bulk this way, if your document has multiple pages, each one of those pages will be added as a separate element. You may want to individually add pages. If you do end up adding multiple pages of separate elements, you can clean that up and I'll show you how in just a moment. But let's take an example of, let's take a look at what that looks like. Here we have this peace petition to Congress. Adding the plus sign would also add both pages of this document or I can go down here and individually add pages as well. So I'm just gonna add the first page to the activity we are working on. And then I'm going to return to the activity just to talk about a couple of other steps to consider as you work on this particular seeing the big picture activity. Now we've added documents. This is a matching activity. You can match documents to documents or you could also add text. So in this case, since we are adding, we are doing a matching of the different freedoms from the First Amendment in action, we're going to want to add some text. So the right to petition the government. Just as a quick example, save and close. And that comes up now as a text box that you'll be able to match the document to. When you're doing a seeing the big picture activity, and I'm gonna jump ahead without adding all of my documents yet, one thing to keep in mind is the grid. And we see a separate grid section here. You'll want to make sure you choose enough documents or add enough text boxes to fill a grid. So the smallest size is a two by three. So you have six elements, three matches. The next size is a three by four, which gives us 12 elements right with six matches. Since we have five freedoms of the First Amendment, that's five matches. So to get us up to six, I would also add the Bill of Rights, the original Bill of Rights document to this activity and just make that a final match. You also have the opportunity to choose a document to reveal as a reward after all the matches have been completed. It could be an activity or a document from that activity or a special one that you upload for that reward. I also wanna go back to add elements and notes since I just added that one page from the petition, we just see that one page instead of both pages here. However, students, when they view the document in the activity, they'll still be able to see all the pages of that petition. But we just wanna make sure that each of these elements here are the individual elements that we want students to match. From there, you'll have a couple more steps with instructions along the way for how to customize this activity. The setup for this particular activity will include actually making those matches. So making sure you set each of those matches in your activity. And then the for students and for teachers section doesn't change from what we saw earlier. That's a quick overview of how to create your own activity. There are lots of instructions built into this site. In fact, if you go to menu, resources, activity, creation guide, you can find these step-by-step instructions and on each of the activity tools pages. If we go back to that page, like our first activity type here, you'll see the instructions for how to create each activity, as well as some teaching tips and learning objectives. And as always, if you ever run into any questions or issues, you can always reach out to us using the contact us button on docsteach.org. So good luck creating your own activities. We can't wait to see what you come up with.