 Welcome to Getting Started with DocsTeach, Finding and Saving Activities. This is docsteach.org, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives. The National Archives is an independent federal agency that preserves and protects the historically valuable records of the United States government and makes them available to the public. We have billions of records at the National Archives and among those records are incredible primary sources for teaching history and civics. So we created docsteach.org to make finding those primary sources and sharing those primary sources with your students a little easier. Today we're going to check out how to find and share activity tools for teaching with primary sources that you can share with your students. But before we dive into how to find activities, let's do a quick overview of what is an activity tool. So from the docsteach home page, I'm going to go to menu, activity tools, all tools, and this gives us an overview of these 12 different activity templates for teaching with primary sources. Each of these tools will help students develop historical thinking skills, practice primary source analysis, and the tools focus on different skills. We have tools for analyzing documents. We have tools for focusing on details, really spotlighting different parts of documents or focusing on different parts of images. We have tools for comparing and contrasting different documents. Tools for finding a sequence, mapping history, weighing the evidence, using primary sources to support two different historical interpretations. There are 12 different tools to choose from and clicking on one of these tools will give you an overview of the learning objectives, some recommendations if you want to create your own activity using this template, and how to teach with this tool. Let's go back to the docsteach home page and find out how we can find an activity tool and share it with our students. So on this page, well, first I should mention I'm currently logged into my docsteach account. Anyone can visit docsteach and find primary sources or search for activities created by the National Archives education team. However, if you create a free account, you will also be able to browse activities that have been created and published on docsteach by your fellow educators. You'll be able to save the activities that you find. You'll be able to view students' responses to activities online, and even create your own or modify existing activities. So since I'm logged into my account, you'll see some of those additional features today. So let's start by clicking discover activities you can teach with. I'm going to go ahead and on this page do a simple keyword search. You can start with a keyword search or you can dive in by browsing by historical era. Since we have the records of the U.S. government, we have records from the revolution and the new nation up through contemporary United States. You'll also find activities that are geared towards teaching civics and government or activities that kind of span historical eras. You can also narrow down your search in four ways. You can narrow down your search by historical era here. You can also narrow down your search by grade level. The thinking skill the activity promotes. Or if you're looking for one of those particular activity tools that we just saw an overview of, you can search specifically by tool. I'm going to start with a simple keyword search. In this case, let's do a search for civil rights. Okay, this search pulls up 104 results. As we start to look through these activities, you'll see ones created by the National Archives Education team. And as you go further through your search, you'll find activities created and published by other educators. This is where, as we can see, we have activities that span different historical eras. This can be where narrowing down your search by historical era can be helpful. For example, if we want to focus on civil rights in the post-World War II era, we can narrow it down to 1945 to the 1970s. It also might be helpful to narrow your search to the grade level you're currently teaching. Let's go ahead and do a search for middle school activities. We can now find 11 different results that come up. We'll go ahead and click on our first activity. Now while we did a search for a middle school activity, it's worth noting that if you're searching for elementary or middle school activity, activities can work for multiple grade levels. So it's worth searching a grade above or below your target audience. So for example, while this one is tagged middle school, when we look at the description, we find it can work for grades four through eight as well. This page that we're looking at is the teacher page. This is information for you, the person facilitating this activity. You'll find information about the historical era. It connects to the thinking skill. It correlates to the Bloom's taxonomy level. You'll find a brief description of the activity and some suggested teaching instructions for national archives activities. This will also include an estimated time that it will take to facilitate this activity. These suggested teaching instructions will also provide some guidance on how to facilitate this activity. In this case, this is recommended to present this one to the entire class. But with Docs Teach, there are a lot of different ways you can share these activities with your students. As we scroll down the page, you'll also find a list of the documents used in this activity to give you that overview. If you'd like to share this activity with your students, you'll want to click start activity. This takes us to the student page. This is the link you would share with your students. So you could share this to an entire class. You could share your screen and share it with your students that way and have a discussion around this particular image. Since this is the zoom crop activity, students will start by looking at a zoomed in portion of this image and they'll click switch view to see the whole image and put the story together. There are some discussion questions students can consider as they examine this particular image, as well as a when you're done question to wrap up this activity. So this could be done together as a class, but there are also ways you can assign students to complete activities online. So we'll dive into that in a moment. Let's say you like the look of this activity. You want to save it for later? Well, if we go back to our teacher page, there are some options for doing that. These three icons here give you some additional tools. So the star icon will allow you to bookmark this activity. And as we when we click start the activity, we'll see a drop down menu that says bookmark this activity in my activities and you can choose a classroom. A classroom is simply a group of activities that you've saved together. I'm going to go ahead and add this one to my default classroom in a moment. You'll also see the option for making a copy of this activity. If you want to modify the questions or change it up a little bit, you can make a copy and actually go in and change it or you can print the entire activity. But let's go ahead and add this to my default classroom. So when we go when we add an activity, it takes us to our my activities page. We can go to we can also access this page by clicking menu, my account, my activities. And here we see a collection of activities that I've put together. On this page, we'll see a couple of options. We can customize the names of our folders. We can move items around. We can remove them from folders. And we can also share activities with fellow educators or with our students from this page. So for example, if you have a group of activities that you'd like to share with students or with teachers, you can click on copy link to share. This creates two links. The first link is one you can share with teachers that will provide links to the teacher pages of the activities. Or you can share links with your students. This link will give will create a link where students can access the student pages of each of these activities. Well, let's go back to our search and take do another keyword search and talk a little bit more about how you can share activities with your students to complete online. So I'm going to go back to the home page. Let's do that civil rights search again. This time we're going to modify it by high school. So again, we can see activities of different types from different eras. Let's take a look at the impact of Bloody Sunday in Selma. In this activity, students will review a series of documents answering questions as they go along. So this is an example of an activity that pulls together multiple primary sources. Again, we're seeing that this activity works for grades seven through 12 and the approximate time needed is 45 minutes. But let's click on start activity. Again, this is the student URL. If you wanted your students to complete this activity online and review their responses, what you would do is you would start by sharing this URL with your students. Then students would go through these different primary sources, answering questions and putting responses as they go along. And when they're done, they click when you're done. There's usually a wrap up question for them to complete. And then they can submit their activity responses to you. Now I should mention students do not need a docs teach account to complete an activity. All they need to do is enter in their name, enter in your email address associated with your account, enter their response and click send response. You can then review your students completed activities. So no account required for the students. They just need your email address that you've linked to your docs teach account. And you'll be able to review the responses to this activity. Now to find your responses, you would go to menu, my account, my students responses, and you would be able to find their completed activities here. Now there are additional ways you can organize these responses, different ways you can assign student work. We'll go over those in more detail in a future session. But the basics are all you need to do is share that student URL with your students. They type in your email address associated with their account and submit their responses for you to review. And again, if we go back to menu, my account, my activities, you can even click on that copy link to share, copy the link to share with students, which takes us to a collection of activities, which when your students click on them, they will get access to the student pages where they could then complete the activity and submit their responses for you to review. Now if you're new to Docs Teach, another great place to get started looking for primary sources and activities is the popular topics pages. These can be found by clicking on menu, popular topics. And these are curated collections of primary sources and activities we put together on a variety of topics. Today we've seen how you could use Docs Teach to find activities for teaching different historical topics. Docs Teach is also great for teaching civics. For example, if we click on the Constitution, we'll find a list of primary sources for teaching some of the big ideas from the Constitution, as well as activities for hitting the civics topics like checks and balances in action, the First Amendment. Or if we click on the Constitution at work, we'll find a matching activity where students analyze primary sources from the National Archives and then connect them to the different article and section of the Constitution that they embody. So again, this first page is for you. The educator gives you some information on what this activity is all about, how to facilitate it. Sometimes there are some additional helpful links that are included in that description. And then to share it with your students, you would share the URL you find when you click start activity and then students would be able to complete this matching activity on their own and submit their completed activity to you to review. Well, now it's your turn. The best way to get started is to dive right in, create your free account, start searching for primary sources and activities. And you can always stay up to date on the latest on Docs Teach by following us on Twitter at DocsTeach and tuning in for future webinars.