Social Studies

= Social Studies =

General Social Studies Sites
Curriculum Links
 * Links for websites relevant to the Alberta Social Studies curriculum, from the Social Studies Specialist Council of the Alberta Teachers Association.

Educational Resources in Social Studies
 * The Open Learning Network’s Community Learning Network of British Columbia well-organized collection of links to useful websites.

Reading Quest: Making Sense in Social Studies
 * Developed by an educator, this site provides strategies for teachers to help students with content reading and comprehension.

EconEdLink
 * Internet-based economic lesson materials for K-12 teachers and their students.

LawCentral Alberta
 * Provides access to law-related resources coded by their relationship to the Alberta curriculum.

Museum Box
 * This site provides the tools for students to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. Teachers can register to review and assess their students' projects.

Teaching Tolerance
 * News and classroom activities designed to develop tolerance in students, from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Children's Literature with Social Studies Themes
 * Annotated lists of children's books related to the big topics of social studies. Some are accompanied by articles explaining how the teacher used particular titles in the classroom; e.g. click on Rules and Laws: Primary for an essay about using a variety of picture books to explore the issue of classroom rules.

Teach with Music
 * Created by teachers in Southern Alberta to help other teacher incorporate more music into their classrooms, especially in Social Studies. Lists songs, with lyrics and links to audio, under big themes such as Political Music, Environmental Issues, Canadian History etc and also provides teaching ideas.

Historical Thinking
Historical Thinking
 * A Canadian project that offers practical ways of encouraging promoting and assessing students’ historical thinking in K-12 classroom settings. Includes information and lessons related to six different aspects of historical thinking.

Historical Thinking Standards
 * From the National Center for the Study of History in Schools at UCLA.

A Focus on History, Literacies and ICT
 * Long-time social studies and ICT expert Jamie McKenzie writes about a dozen strategies to bring history to life for students (and make them think deeply in the process).

Geographical Thinking (see also Global Issues: Visualizations)
Geography Lesson Plans
 * From National Geographic, organized by grade level or thematically.

Worldmapper
 * A striking set of maps illustrating the familiar world re-sized according to such statistics as births, attended births, cars, tourists, population etc. Note that the reason the maps look very distorted is that they are "equal area cartograms", otherwise known as density-equalising maps. The cartogram re-sizes each territory according to the variable being mapped. See also their dramatic video 57 Million Deaths and watch the dimensions of different continents change depending on the age group of those who die.

Mapping Our World
 * Mapping our World is a whiteboard teaching product for 8 to 14 year olds from Oxfam. It explores the relationship between maps and globes, and how different projections influence our perception of the world. It challenges the idea that there is one 'correct' version of the world map.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM Why Are We Changing Maps? (from West Wing)]
 * The YouTube clip from an episode of West Wing makes a humourous but effective point about how maps shape our understanding of the world, as an imagined group of geographers advocate for use of the "Peters Projection Map."

Mapping the World
 * A three-part video series from TVO (Ontario's educational television station) explores the fascinating history of maps, and how they are snapshots of moments in history.

The True Size of Africa
 * An outline of Africa, with other countries superimposed on it (including the United States, China and several European countries) vividly demonstrates Africa's real geographic size.

Middle East Map Game
 * Drag each country name to its proper place on this map of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

Media Literacy
Media Smarts
 * Canada's centre for digital and media literacy.

Global Media Perspectives
 * A series of five lessons engaging students in thinking about how media perspectives differ depending on the country, target audience, and political and social context. Includes media documents representing Africa, Europe, Latin America and Asia on topics such as Islamic cultural identity in Europe and Asia, Latin American immigration, the food crisis in Africa and India's rise in the global economy.  For secondary classrooms.

Classroom Fact Check
 * Meant to help students acquire the skills to see through the 'spin'. Includes 'Tools of the Trade,' which outlines a five-step framework for analyzing information and avoiding deception, and lesson plans which focus on the basic concepts of reasoning and understanding the messages of advertising and politics. (fairly American focused however)

Media Construction of the Middle East
 * A Digital Media Literacy Curriculum, complete with teacher guides, student handouts, student worksheets, teacher answer sheets, slideshows and video clips. Its purpose is to challenge stereotypical, simplistic and uninformed thinking about the Middle East while teaching core information and vocabulary about the Arab/Israeli conflict, the war in Iraq, and the resurgence of Islam.  A collaborative project of Ithaca College and the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
 * FAIR is a media watch group that offers well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship.

World History
Best of History Websites
 * An award-winning portal that contains annotated links to over 1000 history web sites as well as links to hundreds of quality K-12 history lesson plans, history teacher guides, history activities, history games, history quizzes, and more.

Nova: History
 * Websites created in conjunction with programs that have an historical focus, on PBS's Nova series.

Exploration through the Ages
 * From the Mariners' Museum in Virginia. Trace explorers throughout the ages, from the days of ancient Egypt to the search for the North Pole, and look at their ships and their tools of navigation.

The African-American Migration Experience
 * A very complete introduction to the African American experience, beginning with the trans-Atlantic slave trade but focusing also on the twelve other defining migrations through which peoples of African descent remade themselves and their worlds. Another good source for this topic is Captive Passage from the Mariner's Museum of Virginia, which provides information and images about the Transatlantic slave trade and the making of the Americas.

Teaching a People's History of the Abolition Movement
 * Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools shares the role-playing scenario he developed to help students understand that the abolition of slavery wasn’t simply a matter of one thing happening after another—it wasn’t the smooth unfolding of History leading to Freedom. "I wanted students to see that history is a series of choice-points and there is nothing inevitable about the direction of society, that where things move depends on how we analyze the world and how we act on that analysis."

Black Ships and Samurai
 * A terrific visual narrative on Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan, from MIT's Visualizing Cultures website.

First World War
 * A very extensive multimedia history of World War One, including a large number of primary documents as well as photographs, propaganda posters, archival recordings etc.

The American Experience
 * Many of the films in this PBS series about the history of the United States can be freely viewed online, and some of the topics have resonance far beyond the United States (and certainly for Canada); e.g The Crash of 1929.

Sputnik Escalates the Cold War
 * A very comprehensive website about the Cold War, made available through ABC-Clio Schools' 'History and the Headlines' initiative. Includes a detailed introduction, primary documents, video clips, essays on a wide variety of related topics and teaching activities.

World Cultures
The Danger of a Single Story
 * In this TED talk, Nigerian Novelist Chimamanda Adichie eloquently talks about the consequences of our only knowing a single story about another person or country.

World Values Survey
 * The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World graphically shows the strong correlation of values in different cultures of the world and various graphs show more detail.

Country Profiles
 * From the BBC News: a guide to the history, politics and economic background of every country in the world. Provides timelines for each country and often audio or video clips from BBC archives.

Visualizing Cultures
 * Launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning, the VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China.

Mythology: Windows to the Universe
 * Myths about the universe - the solar system, the earth, the sun, the moon and the stars from many different cultures of the world. Website from the Windows to the Universe project run by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

Holiday Traditions
 * Information about Christmas customs in many different countries, and about other "Holidays of Light": Chinese New Year, Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan.

Visualizations
200 Years in 4 Minutes
 * In this amazing animation, from the BBC, Hans Rosling graphs the correlation between income growth and life expectancy in 200 countries over the last 200 hundred years.

Earthpulse
 * Map and compare global trends. Explore related essays, photo galleries, and information graphics. From National Geographic.

Stat Planet
 * Roll your cursor over any country in the world to see statistics in many different categories, from population to ICT. This site also gives you the ability to create interactive maps and has many examples that can be shown, full screen, in a classroom.

Info Nation (United Nations)
 * An interactive web site that allows the user to generate graphs comparing different countries in the world with regard to aspects of population, health, economy etc.  Part of the United Nations cyberschoolbus website.  Alberta educators and students can create similar graphs through "Culturegrams," accessible through the LearnAlberta.ca website.

A Developing World
 * An interactive map produced by CIDA and Canadian Geographic that produces comparative bar graphs on any two different countries of the world, plus provides statistical information on the selected countries on themes such as development, population, poverty,health, education etc. Also provides teacher resources such as lesson plans.

Google Public Data Explorer
 * This Google labs project makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate by creating visualizations from them. You can choose which data set you want to explore, and choose which countries to compare.

OECD Better Life Initiative
 * An interactive tool that lets you decide what qualities of life deserve priority, and then see how different countries rank on these attributes.

A History of Poverty
 * Watch the world map change over the last 200 years in a graphic view of how poverty has changed, marked in relation to significant world events.

Breathing Earth
 * An interactive world map that shows carbon dioxide emissions for each country of the world, as well as birth and death rates. Place your cursor over a country to have the information appear.

2010 Global Peace Index map
 * Click on any country to see where it ranks in the global peace index; click again to see how it scores on the factors taken into consideration in the ranking. Also see how its ranking has changing between 2007 and 2010.

Global Literacy Rates
 * An interactive map that brings up facts about literacy rates when you click on individual countries.

The Story of Stuff Project
 * Annie Leonard's project to create short, easily shareable online movies that explore some of the key features of our relationship with 'Stuff,' including the story of bottled water, electronics, cosmetics etc.

Billion-Dollar-O-Gram
 * A visualization of all things in the world that the media reports billions of dollars are being spent on - see where the majority of the money is actually going.

Map of Europe: 1000 AD to the Present Day
 * A very condensed history lesson as we watch the map change as empires and nations emerge and disappear.

Geography of a Recession
 * This interactive map vividly shows the rise in unemployment rates in the United States between January 2007 and November 2010.

Lesson Plan Ideas
Humane Education
 * "It’s time to make living ethically, sustainably, and peaceably on this planet the very purpose of education." Offers humane education activities for schools, and various professional opportunities for teachers.

Understanding Prejudice
 * Interactive exercises offering unique perspectives on prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination and over 2,000 links to prejudice related resources.

War, Terrorism and Our Classrooms
 * Links to thoughtful essays and classroom teaching ideas, developed in response to the Sept 11th attacks; created by Rethinking Schools.

World of 100 Simulation Activity
 * A CIDA developed activity appropriate for any year of the senior high Social Studies curriculum. Students participate in a simulation that demonstrates the inequalities and inequities in the use and control over global resources.

CHF Global Education Program
 * The Canadian Hunger Foundation provides lessons for all grade levels designed to help students to look deeper at global issues. Students will learn about the realities faced by rural communities in developing countries and their determination to build on their strengths to get out of poverty. Lessons are downloadable as zipped files.

Be the Change
 * Created by the Ontario School Library Association, this website has wealth of resources and lesson ideas to: raise awareness of children’s rights, create a sense of understanding of world citizenship, and empower youth to make a difference.

Worldmix
 * Click on either "Ideas:Assignments" or "Education" for thoughtful suggestions for exploring the concept of globalisation more deeply.

Oxfam Fair Trade Lesson Plans
 * A series of lessons connected to the idea of fair trade, including several called 'No Sweat' and a series of lessons about the Industrial Revolution. It might be useful to incorporate their downloadable powerpoint. Make Trade Fair.

World Food Program
 * There are many resources on this site that can help teachers explore the subject of world hunger with their classes including facts & figures, interactive maps and games.

Global Nomads
 * A non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing cross-cultural understanding between the world's youth, through interactive technologies such as videoconferencing. This website also has short videoclips of life in other countries, and lesson plans related to their current programs.

Flat Stanley Project
 * A cardboard cutout tours the world and his student creator follow his adventures and meet other "Stanleys" from around the world. A popular classroom activity.

Be the Change
 * An interactive website which introduces the stories of five extraordinary men and women who do not simply stand by in the face of injustice. By registering, students can respond online to these people's stories.  Resources are provided to help teachers use this in the classroom.  A project of the Facing History and Ourselves organization.

Against All Odds
 * An interactive game that puts players into the position of being a refugee. Created by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to increase students knowledge and awareness about what it's like to have to flee your country.

Tracked in America
 * "An interactive Web site that explores how surveillance techniques have been used against citizens and residents of the United States since World War I. The Web site contains lesson plans for grades 9-12; however they may be appropriate for some middle school students."

Chronicling Despair and Hope in Darfur
 * A very comprehensive website about the situation in Sudan, made available through ABC-Clio Schools' 'History and the Headlines' initiative. Includes a detailed introduction, primary documents, video clips, essays on a wide variety of related topics and teaching activities.

Current Events
The Learning Network Blog
 * Ideas for teaching about current events from the New York Times. As well as referencing their own articles they create links to other great resources on the topic.

Newsy
 * A multi-source online video news site that monitors, analyzes and presents the world's news coverage. Newsy claims that, through its coverage, it tries to show how the world's news organizations are reporting a story.

Al Jazeera
 * The English language website of the most watched channel in the Middle East.

General Resources
History Trek
 * Created at McGill University, this site links you to over 2300 websites about Canadian history that have been specially chosen for students aged 9 to 12. History Trek is available in both English and French versions.

A Scattering of Seeds: The Creation of Canada
 * Website of the 52 part TV series celebrating the contribution of immigrants to Canada. There are extensive descriptions of each story and lesson plans on this website. While episodes can't be viewed here, many clips can be watached on White Pine Pictures YouTube channel.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography
 * The online version of the authoritative biographical resource about important figures in Canadian history, currently encompassing persons who died between the years 1000 and 1930.

Canadian Constitutional Documents
 * All the acts related to the Constitution passed since 1867 up to and including 1993.

Mystery Quests: Great Unsolved Mysteries In Canadian History
 * A variety of webquests about unsolved mysteries in Canadian history, grouped for students of various ages, from a consortium of Canadian educational institutions.

Canada Yearbook Teachers' Toolkit
 * Lesson plans related to the digitized collection of historical Canada Yearbooks, from Statistics Canada.

Population of Canada by Latitude
 * This graph shows, better than words, where the bulk of Canada's population lives.

Quality of Life in Canada: A Citizens' Report Card
 * Although this Canadian Policy Research Network report dates from 2002, its attempt to capture what citizens believe essential to quality of life and to assess Canada against that standard is still of interest because 'quality of life' is one of the concerns in the Alberta Social Studies curriculum.

Exploration: The Fur Trade and the Hudson's Bay Company
 * A well-organized and quite comprehensive site about the history and role of the fur trade in Canada, from Canadiana.ca

Storming Juno
 * An extremely well done exploration of the storming of Juno Beach on D-Day in 1944, this combines video and interactive elements, as well as numerous interviews.

Black History Canada
 * Described as an annotated guide to the history of Canada's black community, this comprehensive site is a fascinating narrative about the little-known Black experience in Canada, with many profiles of individuals (some containing short video clips) and a teacher section showing how this topic ties into school currricula across Canada.

First Nations History and Culture
CBC Aboriginal
 * A CBC site focusing on contemporary and archival stories about aboriginal Canadians.

First Peoples of Canada
 * A virtual exhibit from the Canadian Museum of History. They also have other First Peoples online exhibits that are worth exploring.

A Journey into Time Immemorial
 * A virtual museum site worth highlighting because of its quality and connection to Alberta's grade five Social Studies program. Developed in collaboration with the First Nations people, it conveys a sense of the traditional culture, environment, activities, and values of these people, ncluding information about the potlatch tradition.

Where are the children?
 * A very comprehensive interactive website about the history of Canadian residential schools.

Resources for American Indian Research
 * Advice about reliable sources on American Indian culture, history, etc. Although American, much is relevant to Canada too.

Maps and Atlases
Canadian Atlas Online
 * Lessons and activities designed for the Canadian Geographic Society's online Canadian Atlas.

Atlas of Canada
 * Access to many versions of Canadian maps: historical, topographical, thematic etc.

Historical Political Map of Canada
 * By clicking on different years the user sees the changing political boundaries of Canada. From the Canadian Geographic Society's website.

Rights, Responsibilities and Government
Canadian Parliament
 * Classroom and background resources for teachers about the Canadian Parliamentary system.

Canada's Rights Movement: A History
 * Designed as a teaching and research tool about the major events in the history of human rights in Canada since the 1930s. Not only introduces the issues but provides an array of related primary documents.

Prime Ministers of Canada
 * Quick facts and biographical information about each of Canada's Prime Ministers, supplemented (in the case of those in office since the 1950s) with hearing or seeing other people speak about their legacies.

Your Tax Dollars
 * Colorful and understandable graphs showing where Canadians' tax dollars go, and where they come from (from the Department of Finance)

Civic Mirror
 * A combined online and classroom citizenship education program that advertises itself as "turning classrooms into countries, students into citizens, and teachers into 21st century educators." There is both a Canadian and a US version, and schools pay a fee for using it but a limited number of free 30-day trials are available. It can be used from upper elementary to college level, and some Alberta schools are trying it for grade nine Social Studies.

Prairie History
Prairie Populism
 * Contains four integrated tools: Simulation, Teacher Toolkit, Canadian Connections Forum, and Virtual Archive that immerse students in an experience that teaches them how populism, active citizenship and grassroots activism have impacted the nation building experience.

This Week in Western Canadian History
 * Click on any week to find stories of significant events in the history of Western Canada that happened that week.

Exploring the West
 * While primarily American, these three learning units incorporate thoughtful questions and information about Canada. The units are on urban growth (Calgary is used as the Canadian example), maps (the emphasis is on reading maps as historical artifacts), and cowboys (myths about Canadian and American cowboys are compared). Designed for secondary teachers with the objective of showing students that the West has been shaped by policy and environmental factors, as well as by history and popular myth.

Virtual Museum of Metis History and Culture
 * Their 'Learning Resources' section contains all learning resources commissioned for the Virtual Museum, in addition to many of the Gabriel Dumont Institute’s proven educational resources from the past.

Alberta
Spirit of Alberta
 * Here the 2Learn.ca Education Society has developed a portal that gives access to their resources about Alberta, including curriculum about Alberta, project and activity ideas and links to online resources.

Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta
 * The Glenbow Museum's online exhibit and detailed, thoughtfully-planned teaching resources about some of the adventurous, hard-working, and spirited men and women who shaped Alberta.

Albertasource.ca
 * Although it calls itself Alberta's online encyclopedia, this is actually a web portal. It was developed by the Heritage Community Foundation to gives access to nearly 80 purpose-built websites that provide information, in diverse formats, about Alberta's historical, natural, cultural, scientific and technological heritage.

Alberta Tomorrow
 * Designed for teachers and students, this is an educational tool designed to help students understand the process of sustainable planning, to balance land-uses such as agriculture, oil and gas and forestry with ecological integrity.

Our Roots
 * Educational modules developed by Alberta students and teachers, working with the Galileo Centre, University of Calgary.

Alberta Edukits
 * Produced by the Alberta Heritage Community Foundation this site provides access to a variety of lesson plans specifically about Alberta, including several related to aboriginal culture and identify, as well as Alberta’s natural resources.

Seeing with New Eyes: A Journey through Blackfoot Knowledge
 * As students pursue this, their goal is to help an aboriginal teen reconnect with his Blackfoot heritage by exploring culturally significant sites, interacting with Blackfoot elders, and hearing traditional stories. There is an accompanying online teacher toolkit. A collaborative project of the Archives Society of Alberta and Red Crow Community College, facilitated by the Alberta Online Consortium.

Niitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life
 * The story of the Blackfoot people from an online exhibit by the Glenbow Museum.

Letters from the Trunk
 * Enter an interactive virtual train station filled with photographs, newspapers, posters and recordings that provides evidence of the lives and experiences of Canadian immigrants. Inside the station are trunks containing the experiences of three immigrants, complete with the photographs, letters, and recordings that tell their story. An Archives in the Classroom collaboration between the Archives Society of Alberta and the Alberta Online Consortium.

Museokits
 * The Glenbow Museums's museum on-the-go program includes objects for display and study, educator notes with student-centered activities and support materials. There are kits on a number of different topics in Alberta history, available for loan to schools for two-week periods for $80.

A Matter of Life and Death
 * An interactive decision-making game, based on the real-life 1929 journey of Wop May and Vic Horner to Little Red River, Alberta to prevent a 1929 diptheria epidemic. From the Canada Aviation Museum.

Calgary History
Community Heritage and Family History Digital Library
 * Three searchable collections of photographs: 1) historical postcards from Calgary and Alberta 2) photos of historical buildings and residences in Calgary, taken between 1953 and 1977 3) contemporary photographs of the construction/renovation of well-known facilities in the downtown core, documenting Calgary's construction, architecture and development. From Calgary Public Library.

Calgary Heritage Initiative Society
 * Get students involved in thinking about preserving Calgary's heritage by exploring the issues around saving old Calgary buildings.

Don's Cemetery Page
 * Stories of some of the interesting people buried in Calgary's Union Cemetery, including a number of Northwest Mounted Policemen.

Return to Cool Teaching Links