Create Videos and Posters on the U.S. National Archives Digital Experience

This afternoon as part of a Primary Resources 2.0 workshop that I conducted (workshop outline here), we explored some resources on the National Archives Experience Digital Vaults. The Digital Vaults offers three good tools that students and teachers can use to create content using images and documents from the National Archives.

The National Archives Digital Vault poster and video creation tools allow students to drag and drop digital artifacts into a poster or video. The National Archives provides images, documents, and audio in an easy to use editor. When making a poster students can combine multiple images, change background colors, and create captions to make collages of digital artifacts. See the screen capture below for a demonstration of poster editing.

Creating a video is just as easy as creating a poster in the Digital Vaults. To create a video simply drag your selected images on to the editing templates, type image captions, select the duration of display for each image, and select audio tracks. See the screen capture below for a look at the video editor.

Applications for Education
The Pathways tool in the Digital Vaults can be used to create small quizzes that ask students to identify the connections between two or more images or documents. To start, drag one image to you Pathways menu then select a related item to add to your Pathway. Type in a clue for students to use to help them make the connection. When you share your Pathway with others, they will see only your first image and your connection clue, they have to find the image that connects. Take a look at a sample Pathways challenge here.

The Cotton Gin Animated

It's difficult, if not impossible, to teach early U.S. History without discussing the impact of Eli Whitney's cotton gin on the production of cotton. Whenever I mentioned the cotton gin to my students for the first time they would ask what it looks like and how it works. I somewhat satisfied their curiosity by showing them pictures and video clips like this one. Now, thanks to Ken Halla and his US History Teachers Blog I have another resource to use. 

The Eli Whitney Museum website has an animated illustration of the cotton gin and how it functions. You still might have to explain some parts of the process and you will still have to explain to students why the cotton gin is significant in US History, but the illustration is still helpful.

Applications for Education
You might want to pair your use of the animated cotton gin with this primary source lesson plan from the National Archives. The lesson plan is built around the documents and drawing that Eli Whitney submitted with his patent application.

Building a Gold Mine

Last week I shared a list of lesson plans for teaching about historical gold rushes in North America. Yesterday, the National Archives' featured document was this image of men developing a gold mine in the Sierra Nevada. That image gave me the idea for a VoiceThread project about gold rushes. You could start with this image (pictured below) and ask students to share their thoughts about the construction techniques and the men in the picture. Then have students search sources like The Commons, US National Archives, or simply Google Images to find more images to add to and comment on in theVoiceThread that they start.

Image source: Today's Document from the National Archives