Social Studies

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Social Studies

General Social Studies Sites

Teaching Current Events Links

  • From the Social Studies Specialist Council of the Alberta Teachers Association.

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.

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 Strategies

  • "Strategies that empower students as they connect the dots between the ethical choices they’ll face in life, and the positive outcomes they can create in their community and the world." From the important FAcing History and Ourselves website.

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.


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)

Going Deep with Maps

  • An Education Week blog about using the concepts of representation, point of view, scale and position to help students develop a deeper understanding of maps.

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.

Maps That Prove You Don't Really Know Earth

  • A Buzzfeed video that shows all the flaws with the standard Mercator projection, in terms of sizes of different countries and continents.

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."

Useful websites for geography teachers

  • From the U.K. Geographical Association, organized by broad theme.

Confluence Project

  • The goal of this project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to post pictures at each location. An interesting way to learn about the geography of different countries of the world.

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.


Economics

EconEdLink

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

Econkids

  • This website provides recommendations and ideas for using children's literature to introduce economics to elementary school children. From the Rugers University Project on Economics and Children


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. (very 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.

World History Lessons

  • Reading Like a Historian curriculum for world history, from the Stanford University History Education Group.

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.

British Pathé presents: WW1

  • British Pathé holds one of the finest and most comprehensive First World War film archives in the world. The collection has been organised by topic, event and protagonist, and for the first time presented on a single navigable page.

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. See also links under "Canada."

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.


Primary Sources

World History Matters

  • Explore documentary evidence around several significant topics in world history, each designed to help student analyze primary sources. From the Center for History and New Media.

Internet Sourcebooks Project

  • A collection of, or links to, public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented (in English) for educational use. There are sourcebooks for Ancient, Medieval and Modern History and for many different parts of the world.

History Lessons

  • These lessons from the National Archives of Britain primarily focus on topics in British history, but they are excellent examples of engaging students in historical thinking using primary documents and images.

HSI: Historical Scene Investigation

  • Excellent examples of helping students understand the interpretation of primary sources, although all these 'investigative' topics come from American History.

Docs Teach Resources

  • Resources to help you use primary documents in the classroom. From the National Archives of the United States.

EuroDocs

  • Selected transcriptions, facsimiles and translations from the histories of European countries.

Peace and War in the 20th Century

  • Access to almost 3000 archival records, organized around 50 case studies, helps build student understanding about the wars, and peace initiatives, of the 20th century, and also of the role of primary documents in studying history. A collaboration between McMaster University, Hamilton Public Library and the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum.

German Propaganda Archives

  • A collection of both print and visual Nazi and East German propaganda (translated into English).

50 Core Documents in American History

  • Not only links to the fulltext of 50 significant documents in U.S. History, but there are other links to other primary documents related to each one.

Captive Memories

  • The Education section of the website is designed primarily for use by teachers and students to learn more about the experiences of British forces held in captivity in the Far East during the Second World War (many Canadians were also held prisoner). Listen to recorded interviews with 62 men, now all in their late 80s and 90s, sharing memories of their experiences in captivity in the Far East.

The First World War Poetry Archive

  • Over 7000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research. Lots of primary sources about key poets, and the Education section includes over 150 audioclips you can play in the classroom.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution

  • 12 topical essays, 250 images and 350 text documents.

The Tudors

  • Recommended for the interactive way it leads younger students through thinking about historical evidence, using documents and artifacts, as well as learning about life during the Tudor period.

Vintage Ad Browser

  • Find vintage advertisements for a huge number of different products and even ideas (includes propaganda posters)dating back to the 1800s. See also their companion Cover Browser site with over 450,000 covers of comics, books etc.

Retronaut

  • A fun way to look back in time through a collection of images from different time periods and eras (much stronger for the twentieth century). Click on any image for additional related images. Also browsable by categories such as ads, books, fashion and beauty, events etc. Must set up free account or log-in with Facebook, and beware that real advertisements are interspersed on every page.

Powers of Persuasion

  • World War II American propaganda shows various techniques used to convince civilians to support the war. Primarily posters, but also some audio/video files - including Bugs Bunny selling war bonds.

China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980

  • This digital collection answers a need for clear, intelligible and informative English-language sources relating to China and the West, and to almost any aspect of Chinese history during these two centuries of monumental change. Includes primary documents, letters, maps, drawings and photographs. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS ACCESSIBLE ONLY TO UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY STUDENTS SINCE IT IS A LICENSED RESOURCE.


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.

OECD Better Life Index

  • An interactive site where over 80,000 users from different countries around the world share their ranking of 10 factors which contribute toward a better quality of life.

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.

International Days

  • Click on any month's calendar to find out about Internationally Recognized Days that promote issues of international interest or concern.

Holiday Traditions

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

Global Issues

Visualizations and Videos

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.

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.

The World of Languages

  • A visualization showing the number of speakers of the major languages in the world today.

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.

Triangle Returns

  • This powerful video makes a convincing case that little has changed in the global sweatshop economy since the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire 100 years ago. Produced by the the Institute for Global and Human Rights, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion and defense of internationally recognized worker rights in the global economy

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.

Your Life on Earth

  • Enter your birth date and see all the many ways the earth has changed since you were born. From the BBC.

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.

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.

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 .

Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief

  • Three lesson plans correlated with outcomes in Alberta's Senior High Social Studies program.

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."

Primary Sources

Exploring Humanitarian Law

  • An extremely comprehensive resource centre for educators who want students to explore international humanitarian law and the ethical and humanitarian issues that arise during armed conflict, and to develop their capacity to analyze complex situations. It uses many primary source materials (videos, photos, letters etc) and educators are advised to read the methodology sections and view the teacher training workshops.

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.


Canada

General Resources

Specific Resources for Teaching Canadian History

  • Links to resources, many of them primary, about a wide variety of topics in Canadian history, from the History Education Network.

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.

The Virtual Historian

  • A web-based approach to teaching Canadian history as an active practice of historical inquiry, where students are presented with historical challenges. There are a few public lessons, but you have to become a member to access the majority of lessons.

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

First World War

  • Links to a number of excellent Globe and Mail articles about "The War to End all Wars." For very moving paintings showing the battlefields after the war, see the art of Mary Ritter Hamilton.

Time Machine: What Life in Canada was Like Before the First World War

  • An interesting Globe and Mail article with pop-up graphics showing all sorts of aspects of life at the time.

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.

Alternative Service in the Second World War

  • This web site on conscientious objectors and alternative service during the Second World War is designed for use in classrooms across Canada.

Primary Sources (see also Alberta and Calgary below)

Learning Centre Library and Archives Canada

  • This resource is now an archived site, so not all the links work. However many still do, so it still has many links to useful primary resources for Canadian history, and ideas about how to teach with them.

Canadiana

  • The mission of Canadiana.org is to support enduring access to Canada’s digital documentary heritage. It's Canadiana Discovery Portal provides free access to valuable and diverse digital collections of many of Canada’s libraries, museums and archives.

McCord Museum images

  • Historical photographs, cartoons and photos of historical artifacts, organized by different themes in Canadian history, especially the period 1840-1945. A nice feature is that you can download the photos, or make them fill the full screen. The Watch the Birdie game is a fun way to find out about nineteenth century photographic studios.

Canada's Virtual Museums

  • Discover a variety of resources, or lesson plans together with online primary learning resources, from Canada's 'virtual' museums.

CBC Digital Archives

  • Lesson plans for a number of different 'projects, using the historical television clips or radio broadcasts available from the archives of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Images Canada

  • Search for historic photographs from the collections of archives, libraries, museums and universities from across Canada. See also 'image trails' and 'photo essays' for selections of photos on specific topics.

Canadian Letters and Images Project

  • An online archive of the Canadian war experience, from any war, as told through the letters and images of Canadians themselves.

Canadian War Poster Collection

  • A searchable database of over 250 Canadian posters from the two World Wars, with descriptions and images of each poster, an artist index, and an essay about Canadian War Posters. From McGill University Library.

History Quest

  • Although officially called the 'Ontario' History Quest because it was developed for schools in that province, these four online modules each focus on a different period in Canadian history, providing learning activities related to primary documents created during such periods as the 1837 rebellion, the age of industrialization in the early twentieth century and the post-WWII baby boom.

Begbie Contest Society

  • The sample from the annual contest (which the B.C. originators hope to turn into a national history contest for secondary students) demonstrates the use of primary historical documents to assess not only students' knowledge of Canadian history but also their ability to use the skills of critical thinking,historical research and interpretation.

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.

Virtual Museum of Metis History and Culture

  • A rich resources of documents, artefacts, photos and essays from the Gabriel Dumont Institute.

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.

Multicultural Canada

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.

Italian Canadians as Enemy Aliens

  • An extremely comprehensive online exhibit looking at the history of Italian immigration to Canada and what happened to them during World War II. Its replete with lots of primary documents, interviews, and teaching ideas. A partnership between the Columbus Centre for Toronto and Citizenship and Immigration Canada. See also the book Italian Canadian Internment in the Second World War.

The Doukhobor Place in Canadian History

  • A strongly worded article about how minority ethnic groups, especially Doukhobors, are ignored in Canadian history. This is part of a larger website devoted to Doukhobor genealogy and history, with many research links to primary documents related to Doukhobors.

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

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.

Primary Sources

Peel's Prairie Provinces

  • Lesson plans about important topics in prairie history, such as Louis Riel, Aboriginal Education, Immigration, making use of online primary documents.

Peel's Prairie Postcards

  • An image archive of over 15,000 postcards dating back to the turn of the 19th century.

Glenbow Archives Photo Search

  • The Glenbow Archives extensive photo collection can be a great source for finding visual primary resources, including over 2,500 cartoons. Their online collection of Colonel Macleod's letters is also a great resource.

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

  • Several searchable collections of historic Calgary photographs

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.

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