Offering teachers and students frictionless access to primary source historical documents, tools that enable them to construct compelling personal narratives using those resources, and scaffolding to help develop historical thinking skills

Primary Source Documents  Help develop better historical thinking skills  Help develop a sense of historical perspective  Help develop evaluation skills  Help engage students in the “doing of history”

Historical Narratives  An active method of using primary sources  Short digital movie (1-3 minutes)  Explores some historical question  A montage of primary source images  Students narrate the movie in their own voice  An exampleexample  Very engaging way for students to explore history

PrimaryAccess: A Web Application  A web-based tool that scaffolds the entire activity  Access to the primary source resources  Access to historical context information  Integrated historical narrative tools:  Word processor  Voice recorder  Movie editor  Designed to be used by middle and high-school students  Developed in partnership with primary source holders

1. Teacher sets up an activity using resources provided by some of the PrimaryAccess partners, or they can use their own resources.

2. Student looks through the primary source materials the teacher has made available, which can be:  Photographs  Drawings  Newspaper  Documents

3. Student begins to write narration and adds the primary source documents to illustrate that script using the internal word processor in PrimaryAccess webapp. Rather than a timeline in a typical movie editor, the words form the timing for the movie.

4. The student records a reading of the narration in their own voice using the internal voice recorder provided by the primaryAccess webapp.

5. Motion is easily added to make the still images come alive, as Ken Burns does in his documentaries.

6. The final movies can be viewed and shared from any computer with an internet connection. They require no storage at the school’s computer and no special software to be loaded.

Demonstration of the WebApp

Current Status:  Funded under grant from DuPont Foundation  Over 9,000 students / 10,000 movies  Partnership with PrimarySourceLearning  Efficacy study in Northern Virginia Bill Ferster