Workshop Three: Using Primary Sources to Build Big Ideas

Understanding Goal

How do primary sources challenge and inspire our memory, reason, and imagination?

Knowledge

• Primary source inquiry is a learning process that involves asking questions and making discoveries that lead to new understanding.
• Primary sources vary in levels of ambiguity, abstractness, and complexity.

Skills

• Draw inferences about a person, a historical event, a time period, or an abstract theme using primary sources.
• Recognize differentiated instruction in terms of academic readiness level within a student Learning Experience.
• Use an Understanding goal to draw students to the central concepts of a subject.
• Use search strategies to locate items in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC).

Assessment

• Open Lab Checklist
• Receive guidance from instructor related to source identification and classroom application.

Investigative Question

How can discoveries be supported by primary sources that demonstrate different perspectives?

Click to show or hide an item.

1. Model Activities
   • "What's In Your Pocket?"
   • "Life in a Box"

   Performance task: Analyze model activity for:

   • Best Instructional Practices in Workshop Three
   • Learning process using primary sources
   • Knowledge gained about the Library of Congress
   • PrimarySourceLearning.org resources: Browse by Primary Sources used in Learning Experiences from Prints and Photographs Online Catalog
2. Search Strategy
   • Learn more about the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC)
     • Getting to the PPOC
     • Building a Prints and Photographs Search
     • View PPOC Collections by Subject Area
   • Search Exhibitions for additional resources
   • Citing Sources

   Performance task:

   • Investigate PPOC and identify useful resources
3. Patron Actions

   What is your purpose for visiting the Library of Congress today?

   • Visitor - Search using save items of interest in a document.
   • Researcher - Insert and resize primary sources in a document to create student materials.
   • Docent - Search and save primary sources in PPOC and/or American Memory. Create unique matrix of resources, capturing permanent URLs for items.  Use appropriate technology to create student materials.

   Performance task

   • Identify items used to create a primary source-based Learning Experience
4. Exit Card
   1. What have you found useful in Workshops One and Two?
   2. Check how we might be able to help you.
      • Searching
      • Saving permanent URLS
      • Learning Experience ideas
      • Understanding Goals
      • Investigative Questions
      • Other (describe):
   3. List the title of at least one Learning Experience from the Primary Source Learning Collection that you would like to field test.
   4. In the Learning Experience design you are planning, what is the Unit and Understanding Goal?

   Download Exit Card PDF File

5. Follow-up Activity
   • Create and implement primary source-based Learning Experiences.

Useful Links

• Image Detective
• Make a Civil War Film