Carl Lestinsky’s Favorite Websites for Social Studies

Carl Lestinsky’s Favorite Websites for Social Studies

http://www.law.ou.edu/ushist.html

This is an excellent site that contains primary documents related to U.S. History and Government. It is arranged chronologically by century and is easily accessed. It contains notable acts, doctrines, declarations of war, and Presidential addresses.

http://www.nara.gov/education/teaching/teaching.html

The National Archives and Records Administration site offers a selection of primary documents. Although limited they include a brief historical background and lesson plan that incorporates the document. Some of the documents are copies and are accessed from Adobe acrobat and take some time, but well worth the wait.

3. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/mcchtml/corhome.html

This is again a site that offers primary documents. It library is a little more extensive than the previous site yet not as easy to navigate. It is well suited for both U.S. History and Government.

http://www.teachwithmovies.org/

This site proves very useful in selecting appropriate movies or clips of movies to accompany lesson plans. It can be search alphabetically or through key words. Each movie has a description of its educational content as well as detailing certain parts of the movie that are inappropriate for young adults and should be fast-forwarded. It also has a list of movies that is not suggested for classroom viewing.

http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/soc_stud.htm

The PBS Internet site contains lessons, timelines, and other sources of information for most all Social Studies content including Government, Geography, U.S. History, and World History.

http://www.historychannel.com/

The history channel can be accessed through many of the previous sites but is so easy to use I chose to select it as an individual link. The topics can be chosen by either a keyword search or through a timeline after selecting a specific century.

http://www.ipl.org/ref/POTUS/

In this resource there is background information, election results, cabinet members, notable events, and some points of interest on each of the presidents. It also provides links to biographies, historical documents, audio and video files, and other presidential sites.

http://projects.scrtec.org/~soess/

This site serves as a mastery link from the University of Kansas. It has contains sites for most of the Social Studies curriculum and also has a link to the U.S. standards. There are many links to consecutive sites. It is time consuming but very extensive.

http://www.bigeye.com/histus.htm

This site contains various links to U.S. history sources. The home page can link to other Social Study sites as well. There is an excellent Civil War site that can be accessed from this site.

http://education.indiana.edu/~socialst/

This site has resources for teachers in the form of both content area as well as teaching practices. There are general sections for U.S. & World History, Government, and Geography as well as links to teaching strategies.