Primary sources are the raw materials of history — original documents and objects that were created at the time under study. They are different from secondary sources, accounts that retell, analyze, or interpret events, usually at a distance of time or place.

Bringing young people into close contact with these unique, often profoundly personal documents and objects can give them a sense of what it was like to be alive during a long-past era. Helping students analyze primary sources can also prompt curiosity and improve critical thinking and analysis skills.

This is a survey instructors can use at the beginning of a course to learn about students' preferred names, pronouns, identities, goals, and concerns.

Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Julia Ng-Karpieszuk for AP US History; Adaptable to other grades. Group assignment designed to have students make connections between primary resources, historical and neighborhood sites, and the values and persons associated with the Gilded Age. The 3-part culminating project includes a research presentation, a walking tour map, and a creative work.

Within this collection you will find lessons, videos, handouts, and teacher guides you can use in your classroom.  You will also find a brief summary of each resource with the source sited for further exploration, appropriate grade level, approximate lesson length, and learning standards.

This lesson will prepare beginning English language learners who plan to take a U.S. driving test. They will acquire vocabulary to be able to understand and/or to give directions as well as the meaning of road and/or traffic signs.

The goal of this assignment is for students to recognize that adding some randomization and "noise" to a model yields different results each time we run the model, and we can pull some useful statistics from these model results. This introduces the concept of a Monte Carlo method to the students.

Prior to this assignment, students read Chapter 2 (Earth's Climate System Today) of W. Ruddiman's Earth's Climate book and online information about the TRMM dataset. In the computer lab, students download the instructions and the pre-processed dataset from course website. The lab assignment consists of GIS raster algebra operations used to generate average precipitation rasters and to calculate anomalies. Throughout the assignment, students are asked to interpret and explain global precipitation patterns.

Students will be able to see how different communities throughout the world engage digitally. By understanding how different countries and cultures use digital media to engage socially, politically, educationally, and financially students will be able to see how communication is affected by access, infrastructure, and culture.

Title page for Global / Diversity Learning in Chemistry

Provenance: Adapted from the New York Times
Reuse: If you wish to use this item outside this site in ways that exceed fair use (see http://fairuse.stanford.edu/) you must seek permission from its creator.

Students write a research paper (750--1000 words) on a topic of global importance in chemistry, technology, health, environmental sustainability, or another related field. The paper explores the issue by identifying several communities affected by the issue in different ways. At the culmination of the project, students draw on a variety of media resources to describe the several perspectives, and conclude by advocating one approach to addressing the issue. Students assemble their own resources through library research, and are free to model their work on examples provided on the course Blackboard website.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

At the half-way point in the course, students will have knowledge of the biology and ecology of fisheries around the world. Students will individually select a local fishery of interest and choose a stakeholder who participates in some capacity in the fishery. Students will contact this stakeholder, introduce themselves and the project, and arrange an interview. Students will be required to formulate a research question that the interview seeks to answer and write at least 10 questions prior to the interview. After the interview, students will answer their research question using the material gained in the interview, and other relevant literature.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

In this project, students will describe and illustrate events from their own lives and find another person to provide another description of those same events. Students will then compare and contrast the two descriptions. The goal of the project is for students to recognize the ways that perspective can influence storytelling, an important thing to consider when analyzing events in history.

Detailed exploration of contemporary debates and controversies regarding global justice. Topics include: human rights theory, the moral significance of national and cultural boundaries, the currency of distributive justice, global inequality and poverty, environmental devastation, and violence against women and children.

This kit provides the materials and background information needed to engage students in a dynamic and constructive process of learning how global media perspectives differ based on country of production, media source, target audience, and political and social context. There are five lessons representing important issues and media documents from: Africa (news and documentary film clips about the food crisis), Latin America (editorial cartoons about immigration), Europe (news and documentary film clips about Islam and cultural identity), India (magazine covers about India's rise in the global economy), and Southeast Asia (websites concerning Islamic majorities and minorities).

In this assignment, each student works in a group of 4-5 students to have an in-depth reading of the two chapters from an Open Education Resource (OER) book https://pdx.pressbooks.pub/urbandevelopment/ (https://pdx.pressbooks.pub/urbandevelopment/). Each student applies the learned knowledge to a city of their choice. Students may continue to examine this selected city in later case study assignments.

This is a teaching module, directed to undergraduate students in applied mathematics, that presents a Zonal Energy Balance Model to describe the evolution of the latitudinal distribution of Earth's surface temperature subject to incremental levels of cumulative carbon emissions in the atmosphere. A strategy to avert "dangerous levels" of global warming is imbedded in the model. Students working with the module will write a computer code, using a software such as MATLAB or Mathematica, to obtain numerical solutions of the model and simulate strategies that guarantee controlled levels of global warming.

Brian Fagan is an emeritus professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara who has written several books about past climate change and its effect on the course of European history. His latest book, "The Great Warming," focuses on the Medieval Warm Period (circa 10th to 14th centuries) during which the North Atlantic region experienced an unusually warm climate, and discusses historical events and trends that can be correlated with this climatic change. This assignment uses this book, along with student-retrieved newspaper articles, as the basis for a research paper that addresses the issue of global warming, its effect on past civilizations and its anticipated effect on the future of the citizens of New York City.

Based primarily on "The Great Warming", students address the following questions in a 5 page paper:

What methods and data sources do scientists use to determine climates of the past? How reliable are these various approaches?
How was European climate different during the Medieval Warm Period, and how did this climate affect the lives of people in Europe?
How was climate different during the Medieval Warm Period for one other region of personal interest, and how did this climate affect the lives of people who lived in that region?

Using information from "The Great Warming" and three to six articles from past issues of a major newspaper, such as the New York Times, students determine probable effects of global warming to the future populations of either their home city, or of the region for which they documented past climate change.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This is a very well-produced website with material on a wide range of art-related topics. There are essays on specific artists and on more quirky topics like pop star clothing. The images on individual art historical movements are interactive, click and more information appears. There are embedded videos on certain topics. It is a relatively comprehensive and entertaining website, although the topics have to be searched for - it is not chronologically laid out as a text.

A lesson introducing Google Drive and Google Docs to elementary students (2nd - 5th grades).

Google Scholar can be a valuable complement to your institution’s subscription databases when researching a topic. In this lesson, you will learn how Google Scholar works, and how to use it to complement your use of discipline-specific subscription databases.