The History Lab™ is an interactive site where teachers can build primary-source based lessons and activities for use in their classrooms.
The History Lab™ offers an online lesson template that is based on the belief that the learning of history should focus as much on inquiry, reflection, interpretation and constructing hypotheses as on acquisition of canned knowledge. It provides a framework to help educators teach history using the educational power of primary sources, the raw materials of history, in an effective, pedagogically sound way.
In a History Lab™, as in its equivalent in a science lab, students deal directly with real materials (documents, artifacts and images on one hand; chemicals, plants and bacteria on the other). They invest thought in the dynamics, qualities, quantities and relationships of these materials according to one or another methodology. They interpret or draw historical meaning from them. Whether history or science, students are engaging in doing an activity - not merely reading about it or taking notes on a lecture. In the same way that science labs provide students an opportunity to study a topic in depth, so too history labs balance out the superficiality that often characterizes history courses.
A Sample Lab
The History Lab™ is free for use by all K-12 teachers and university professors. Teachers can store their lessons in the History Lab database and retrieve or modify them at any time.
Thanks to @ShiftParadigm on Twitter
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