This is a great website for generating ideas and materials for social studies projects. It offers both ideas and practical, accessible resources that can be used to help various types of literacy in students, especially viewing and representing modes of communication.
In some ways, this site can be a “one stop shop” for educators. It contains everything from scholarly articles on the education profession to inspiring stories to wide variety of free classroom guides/resources. When visiting the site, the user can easily choose to read informational articles or go to resource areas specific to grade level. Although the site itself may not necessarily be geared toward direct assistance with student literacy, it helps to give teachers ideas of directions that they can take their lesson plans working toward literacy goals.
This is one of the best ways to "bring history to life" for students through pictures. In addition to the extensive holdings of online content at the Library of Congress, the digital collections have seemingly endless visual resources available. Using these resources to develop lesson plans that require students to analyze visual history will be a good way to engage them in interacting with content.
When looking for lesson plan ideas and current trends in the discipline field, this site is invaluable for social studies educators. The site contains everything from lesson plans to professional publications to information about continuing learning opportunities.
Published yearly, this list is a review of books specific to the social studies discipline for grades K-12. It is a great resource to keep current on what some recent reading options might be to include with other curriculum content.
The PBS Learning Media website is a great resource to address visual literacy and to supplement traditional text learning. The site is searchable for valuable video and lesson plan resources by both grade level, subject area, and specific topic.
This site is a hands-on tool that helps teachers create a wide variety of rubrics to be used in their classrooms. It is a free website that only requires the creation of an account. After that, users are walked through the rubric creation in a very easy way. When applying Common Core standards to lesson planning, the rubrics that are created will help to ensure that the assignment outcomes align with standards and the learning objectives.
The online lesson planning resources at Smithsonian Education are another great way to challenge students in their course content. The lessons are structured by grade level but offer a great deal of rigor to help students push their own limits in understanding and working with information and text.
This site is a wonderful lesson planning resource for teachers. There are a large number of video and audio clips with an educational purpose as well as links to text documents for lesson planning and worksheet examples. It is focused on educational purposes, so does not contain some of the distraction that can exist with YouTube. It is a great starting resource for teachers to develop digital media lesson plans for students. In the Social Studies content area, it often helps student understanding to show short video clips of an event or era in order to help them visualize the context.