In this video, UK teacher Simon Botten demonstrates beyond-the-basics whiteboard techniques for use in history and geography classes. The video focuses on elementary-level students and on engaging younger children using interaction with the whiteboard.
In this video (14 min.), UK teacher Simon Botten looks at basics in whiteboard use, aimed at elementary-school teachers. He includes exploring and using the software suite that comes with the board, incorporating images and video into lessons, and avoiding overloading students with content and special effects.
Though the presentation was created in the UK and features UK students, the content applies multinationally.
Kathryn Lindholm-Leavy and Graciela Borsato, “Academic Achievement,” in F. Genesee (Ed.), Educating English language learners (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 192.
Cruz & Thornton, "Social Studies for English Language Learners: Teaching Social Studies that Matters," Social Education, in press.
See Cruz & Thornton book, 2009; see also, Jennifer Truran Rothwell, History Making and the Plains Indians, Social Education, 61, no. 1, pp., 4-9, 1996.
Teaching history to English Language Learners poses special challenges owing to its conceptual density and assumed cultural knowledge. It seems obvious that ELLS need additional support and materials to understand content, yet many social studies classrooms are ill-stocked in this regard.
Here we outline how visuals can help ELLs build interest and understanding.
Rationale
Graphic organizers can be effective scaffolds for all history students, but they can be especially helpful for students with limited English proficiency. They allow these students to engage with difficult historical concepts without depending completely upon academic language to convey information.
Graphic organizers are visual tools that allow students to clarify key concepts and understand the relationship between them.
Where can I find good digital images of U.S. History? Are there any good search engines or websites? Google is what I use, but it is less than wonderful. Lots of stuff that is not relevant or usable.
Also, what about copyright? If I understand it, I can use copyrighted images for my own classes, but not share with others.
There is a seemingly endless supply of digital images online related to U.S. history, but as you note, finding high quality, reliable images quickly is often a challenge. One place to start is right here on teachinghistory.org! You can search or browse more than 1,000 Website Reviews to locate resources on specific topics, time periods, or keywords. The websites in this collection have been reviewed for quality, content, and accessibility. Websites should let you know what you’ll find on each site, from texts and images to audio and video. 
See, for example, the review of American Indians of the Pacific Northwest. The review tells you who created the site (the Library of Congress and University of Washington Libraries) as well as what you’ll find: “more than 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text illustrating the everyday lives of American Indians in the Northwest Coast and Plateau regions of the Pacific Northwest,” including housing, clothing, crafts, transportation, education, and work. 
Or learn about Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. This website offers “more than 750 hours of video interviews and 10,000 historic images focused on first-hand accounts of Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II.” The review also mentions specific teacher resources for grades 4–12.
There are two basic answers to your question on copyright. Materials that are in the public domain are no longer covered by copyright restrictions (summarized here: Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States). You are free to use those materials in your classroom, to reproduce them, and hand them out to students. Anything created before 1923 is in the public domain and there are many resources in this category available online, from the more than 1,000 Civil War photographs by Matthew Brady and others to the more than 3,500 glass plate negatives from the Solomon Butcher photograph collection depict everyday life in central Nebraska in Prairie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters. Or the 9,000 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920 that illustrate the rise of consumer culture in America from the mid-19th century on Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850–1920. Here are a few other excellent resources for copyright-free images:
For material protected by copyright, the law allows certain exceptions, known as “fair use,” and many classroom uses fall into this category. There are four factors to consider in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:
According to the U.S. Copyright office: “The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use. . . [including] reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson.” You can learn more about copyright basics from the U.S. Copyright Office or through their publication on Copyright Basics. The University of Minnesota’s Fair Use Checklist might also be helpful for determining fair use in your classroom. See also: Historic Images are Everywhere.
Do you have special materials to teach about the transcontinental railroad and its affects on the West? Specifically looking at those who were part of the labor force building the railroad.
There are several resources available for teaching about the transcontinental railroad. As always, we recommend using the search function on bottom right of our history content page. Here are a few resources that may be of some use.
The Central Pacific Railroad History Museum's site offers a detailed history and several primary sources regarding the construction of the transcontinental railroad, including, for example, photographs, legislation, and letters. They also have an extensive bibliography of print resources.
The Library of Congress’s American Memory Collection on the Chinese and westward expansion has several primary resources that document the experiences of Chinese laborers during the construction of the transcontinental railroad.
If you are looking to provide your students with a brief overview of the transcontinental railroad check out Digital History’s online textbook.
The virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco provides a brief but informative overview of the leading figures, like Leland Stanford, responsible for the completion of the transcontinental railroad.
Lastly, PBS has a lesson plan that examines two of the landmark documents regarding westward expansion: the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act. Activity three in the lesson asks students to compare the construction of the transcontinental railroad from a variety of perspectives, including those of Chinese laborers. We should note that this lesson draws on a PBS documentary video that is not directly available on the site; but many resources are available on the site, and the activities can be easily adapted .
Access 7 activities which introduce the evidentiary and narrative aspects of history to young students. Students familiarize themselves with these topics by exploring their own past school experiences.
This collection of activities found on the Bringing History Home website introduces first graders to important historical concepts. Through exploring the history of their time at school, students learn about topics such as chronology and historical context as well as how to identify and question different types of primary sources. While these concepts may seem fairly sophisticated for first or second graders, the activities introduce them in accessible and engaging ways. There are seven activities that make up this instructional unit. Each activity can stand alone as a single class lesson or can be combined with others for a multi-day lesson or unit. The first activity asks the question, "What is history," and distinguishes between fictional stories and stories about things that actually happened. Understanding history as a story is a central theme throughout the plan, and the subsequent activities focus on the centrality of evidence in creating historical stories.
Activities three, four, and five introduce students to various types of evidence historians use to make sense of the past, through examining school artifacts such as a newsletter and cafeteria menu. In the final activity, students work as a class to construct a mind map about the history of their year at school. Students are then asked to draw a picture that illustrates one of the concepts from the mind map. Finally, students can be assessed by asking them to identify types of evidence that can provide particular types of information about the school. With a focus on making connections to students' experiences and teaching them that history is a story based on evidence, these clear and kid-friendly activities are an elegant way to introduce key aspects of history to young elementary students. Designed for first graders, these activities can be useful for both younger and older students.
Yes
Introduces students to core characteristics of the historical discipline.
Yes
Yes
However, teachers must find text-based artifacts about their school (e.g. a newsletter) to use in the lesson.
Yes
Students are asked to analyze multiple pieces of evidence in order to construct a history of their time at school.
Yes
Students are introduced to sourcing and are asked to consider source information in several activities. See this example. Questions are used to demonstrate the close reading of multiple kinds of sources.
Yes
A very accessible introduction to the idea that history is more than just a set of facts.
Yes
Yes
Includes an assessment activity and rubric.
Yes, but no estimated times are provided for instruction.
A few activities rely on specific texts but substitute texts can be used.
Yes
What is your view on the reliability of the Internet when it comes to studying history?
It may be helpful to give students in all disciplines a basic understanding of what the internet actually is—to differentiate between the medium and the message. According to the How Stuff Works, the internet is "a global collection of networks, both big and small. These networks connect together in many different ways to form the single entity that we know as the Internet." The Internet is an information medium in the same sense as telephone, television, or radio, but the hardware and connectivity of the Internet enable people to publish and communicate in diverse ways (text, audiovisuals, asynchronously, simultaneously) and to access information through a variety of tools (computers, phones, game consoles, datacards). And some of that information we send and receive via the Internet is reliable, and some isn't.
So many exciting materials are online for learning and teaching history, but students need to learn how to evaluate them—just as they should query information in books, newspapers and magazines, for example. Does the information come from a reputable institution or author? Can you check the information? Do the materials or information seem biased? Kathy Schrock's guide for Educators offers rubrics for evaluating websites for elementary, middle, and secondary students as well as for teachers and for specific content types such as virtual tours, blogs, and podcasts. (Some are translated into Spanish.) Schrock also links to articles on web site evaluation and to rubrics designed by other educators. For older students, the Cornell University Library offers Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools with guided questions from looking at the URL to evaluating bias, sources, and author credentials. So, as they explore the reliability of history materials available online, students are practicing skills that translate to other curricula and to their lives outside of the classroom.
Search engines index the content of the web to create an information retrieval system responsive to queries for information. Descriptions of how that happens change rapidly as programmers and technological developments advance. Wikipedia provides one overview; About.com another; and the Library at the University of California, Berkelely, yet another.
However, more than 85 percent of online searches start with Google. It's the universal default search engine, a ubiquitous tool for beginning online research, and it's now a transitive verb inscribed in dictionaries.
Teaching students to search the internet effectively is an exercise in critical thinking and project planning. But let's face it: a Google search for Civil War, for example, yields over 122 million results in about a quarter of a second, and a Wikipedia entry is likely to be among the top five of those results. It's irresistible to explore the first dozen or so of the responses that appear without looking further. Of course, that's not really how we want students to conduct research. Research, in part, is about framing and refining questions, and good research practices at all grade levels mean coming to the game with a learner-appropriate preliminary plan for locating different kinds of information from different sources. Google for Educators offers Search Education lessons developed by Google Certified Teachers. Three modules—Understanding Search Engines, Search Technique and Strategies, and Google Web Search— Features offer scaffolded approaches from a basic overview to an advanced look at validating site authority. But Google isn't omniscient. Nor does Google—or any search engine—plunge researchers into the invisible or deep web—where academically-related material is likely to live among databases, private websites, and multimedia presentations.
A few basic research techniques, however, can help students to examine and refine their topic using Google and to evaluate what kinds of materials are most relevant and where these materials might be. Watch a demonstration of Extra Google Search Options, a three-and-a-half-minute video demonstrating how to narrow search results from many thousands to fewer than three dozen through the use of phrases and quotation marks, plus and minus signs. Common Craft videos are always excellent sources of technology how-tos, and Web Search Strategies in Plain English is no exception. The 2.5-minute video explains how search engines work, how to pick key words, and strategies for refining search results. Boolean searches emphasize the judicious use of three little words. Boolean Operators is a concise, three-minute video explaining the uses of and, or, not, and selected punctuation to narrow a search.
Other search options besides Google help students find specialized resources and to define research parameters. Beyond Google is a downloadable seven-page booklet by Maine social studies teacher Richard Byrne offers a variety of alternative search engines and platforms leading to specific resources to help students broaden and deepen their selection of research sources.
The American Library Association offers similar gateway for younger students, Great Web Sites for Kids. Noodle Tools guides students and teachers through an entire research process from information-gathering to organizing materials and creating and formatting bibliographies. Noodle Tools includes the subscription service, NoodleBib, a collaborative note-taking tool available to schools and libraries. An extensive set of Free Tools, however, helps students locate research sources, identify the best search engines, create bibliographies (including basics for grades 1-5), and includes a special section of Teacher Resources.
Looking for audio for a multimedia project? Soungle is a database of royalty-free, downloadable sounds from drums and church bells to 64 kinds of gun noise, 99 trains, 27 horses, and 33 for rain. The database is not transparent, so the challenge is guessing what search terms or keywords may yield results. Compfight is an easy way to search Flickr for images. Set the search menu to Creative Commons only, and search results will yield images in the public domain. Shahi is a visual dictionary that combines content from Wictionary with images from Google, Yahoo, and Flickr to give both text and visual definitions for keywords.
Consultant Wes Fryer's wiki, Teach Digital, links a compendium of websites, search strategies, and evaluative tools to help "search smarter and better online."
The Internet Public Library (IPL) and Librarians' Internet Index (LII) guide high school students through writing a research paper. How to do research on the web explores how search engines work and how to use them.
Rieger, Oya Y. em>Search engine use behavior of students and faculty: User perceptions and implications for future research. First Monday: Peer Reviewed Journal on the internet. Vol 14, No. 12, December 7, 2009. (http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2716…).