Civics
The Digital Civics Toolkit is a collection of resources for educators to support youth to explore, recognize, and take seriously the civic potentials of digital life. The Toolkit draws on the research and work of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP). The Toolkit explores a range of civic opportunities and dilemmas via 5 modules focused on: Exploring Community Issues, Investigation, Dialogue, Voice, and Action.
Multimedia gems and thought-provoking questions bring some standout lesson plans to life for K-12 students. There's some great content here amidst some so-so tie-ins to a textbook series; take a look and find a few nice tools to drop into your year.
In this free civics learning game, students assume the role of a theater producer adapting true events from United States history to the stage. It’s up to them to analyze primary sources from the Library of Congress to create a new smash Broadway musical hit that is historically accurate and celebrates the power of ordinary citizens in creating change. Students work with different theatrical departments to learn about important aspects of creating a musical, such as costuming, set design, writing, and music. Once all the mini-games are complete, they are rewarded with a scene from their musical on opening night, completely personalized based on the creative choices they made during their game experience.
Civics! An American Musical.mp4Annenberg Classroom is an educational website featuring high-quality, well-vetted, and well-organized teaching materials for the Constitution and related topics. Beyond meticulously thorough civics lessons and links, teachers will delight in the extra perks Annenberg Classroom offers, from free and fully downloadable books to links to sister sites to captions for videos (in up to 13 languages) to multiple timelines to games and more. The clean and colorful layout is inviting; however, skimming through the different tabs is a bit bland and could be redesigned to give teachers a better sense of content.
Thinkalong is a website for exploring political debates developed by Connecticut Public, the parent of Connecticut's public media broadcaster. All of Thinkalong's core content is curated from PBS, NPR, and Connecticut Public. This content -- all news stories -- ranges from text to audio to video and anchors student explorations of current societal issues. Lessons (or Topics) all follow the same structure -- Investigate, Contemplate, Debate -- and begin with a key question (e.g., "Should governments provide universal basic income?"). Lessons are accompanied by a detailed teacher guide, a graphic organizer for collecting information (called Investigate), and a framework developed with the Center for Media Literacy for analyzing information sources (labeled Contemplate).