When you first access the site you will be offered a tour to get a feel of the tools offered and learn how to filter and display data.  Even after the tour is complete, should you need assistance you can always re-open it on the top navigation bar. 

Once the tour is complete, the default map will display population density in the United States.  In the upper left-hand corner there is the option to change data, state, and how the results are displayed (shaded vs. dot density).  Data is categorized into different themes which can be further narrowed down by year or by survey. Although the map only shows information for the United States, it does include Hawaii and Alaska and  different regions can be compared side by side using the gray bubble at the bottom.

PrimaryAccess requires teachers to create a personal account and a class account in order to initiate a project. Producing the narrative then provides a strong active learning experience. While the how to narration is clear, educators will want to create a couple of movies themselves to help adapt instructions to their own classrooms. 

The student must research the topic, construct meaning from the selected primary documents, craft a written story that conveys that understanding to others, and finally, create a movie that uses the documents to accompany the narration in a visually compelling manner. Teachers can guide students to construct these narratives following a typical story structure, with a beginning, middle, and end.

Directions are both concise and detailed including a Teacher's Guide and How-to video. (No software downloads are necessary in order to use PrimaryAccess, nor is it necessary to download selected materials. PrimaryAccess links directly to online resources.)  To create the narrative of the movie, an external microphone connected to the audio input of the computer is requisite, although the narration may be recorded in other programs such as Audacity and saved as an MP3.
 

Zotero works with Firefox (3.0 and up) and Flock (2.0 and up) for Windows, Mac and Linux. The first step is to download and install Zotero. The online users guide gives complete instructions for installation, troubleshooting issues, and step-by-step guides to creating your own research library, organizing it, generating bibliographies and reports, syncing data, and getting the most out of the program. Screenshots and videos illustrate and clarify directions. Zotero's group feature enable's users to share their own work with others, to collaborate with colleagues (publicly or privately), and to discover and join in with other people working on similar interests. Groups represent a wide range of interests and in some instances advanced classes and students use Zotero groups for to share course materials— such as this Purdue University class, 680Archives, a group library for the Archives and Digital Humanities.

Zotero is a compact, accessible, and excellent resource for researchers—and an excellent platform for professional development, for educators to share materials and resources. In the K-12 arena, the software may be most useful for advanced high school students. Regular blog updates keep users on top of new developments and uses for Zotero. Zotero forums help users (and developers) navigate issues and maximize use of various features. The free Zotero account offers 100 MB of free storage. Additional cloud-based storage solutions for PDFs, images, web snapshots, and any other files attached to your Zotero personal and group libraries are available for nominal fees ($20 annually for 1G in June 2101.) storage solutions for heavy users allow you to access your Zotero-attached files from any computer with a web browser, and you can synchronize these files to any computer with Zotero installed.