Social Studies Tools

 

https://museumbox.e2bn.org/  This site provides the tools for you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. What items, for example, would you put in a box to describe your life; the life of a Victorian Servant or Roman soldier; or to show that slavery was wrong and unnecessary? You can display anything from a text file to a movie. You can also view and comment on the museum boxes submitted by others.

 

https://www.vidmap.de/  Vidmap is a both innovative and interactive new way of geographically mapping a video onto a map that updates according to the location of the playing clip. Vidmap goes far beyond of what the popular "geo-tagging" of images and videos has to offer by adding the additional dimension of distance to the process of tagging.

 

https://mapvivo.com/  Realising that there must be a way to bring journeys to life by sharing images, text and video, and placing them together on a virtual map, we built MapVivo to add an extra dimension to your journeys.

Let people see where you’ve been and what you found with MapVivo.

 

https://www.umapper.com/  UMapper makes it easy to create, manage, distribute and monetize online maps.

 

https://web.wm.edu/hsi/?svr=www  The Historical Scene Investigation Project (HSI) was designed for social studies teachers who need a strong pedagogical mechanism for bringing primary sources into their classroom. With the advent and accessibility of the internet, many libraries, universities and government agencies are housing their historical documents online. Simultaneously, there has been a push in K-12 history education to give students experiences that more closely resemble the work of a real historian. The National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) provides standards challenging teachers to design experiences in which students:

 

  • to raise questions and to marshal solid evidence in support of their answers
  • to go beyond the facts presented in their textbooks and examine the historical record for themselves
  • to consult documents, journals, diaries, artifacts, historic sites, works of art, quantitative data, and other evidence from the past, and to do so imaginatively--taking into account the historical context in which these records were created and comparing the multiple points of view of those on the scene at the time (National Center for History in the Schools, 1996, p. 14.

Most social studies teachers accept these challenges but find it difficult to find projects and experiences that are accessible for their students. Researching the "cybraries" of the internet takes time, a precious and scarce resource for the typical social studies teacher. While the Internet provides access to Civil War diaries, newspapers from the 1920's, images from the Jim Crow south, and many other primary sources, the sheer number of possibilities is daunting. Even the most sophisticated search engines provide such a vast number of "hits" that a classroom teacher would find it difficult to gather the necessary resources to launch a primary source investigation/interpretation activity. The HSI project was developed for these teachers.