DocsTeach is a great resource for teachers of U.S. History. DocsTeach, produced by the National Archives Foundation, provides teachers with a free platform on which they can create online history lessons based on images, documents, audio recording, video recordings, and maps. The lessons that teachers create can be shared with their students through a free DocsTeach online classroom environment.

DocsTeach recently added a new document analysis template for teachers to use to create activities for their students. The document analysis template has teachers choose a document or portion of a document for students to analyze. Teachers can then choose from a menu of pre-made document analysis questions for their students to answer while reviewing a document. Teachers can also create their own questions to add to the analysis activity. After completing the activity set-up it is ready to be shared with students. When students complete the activity online, the teacher can view all of the responses online.

DocsTeach will let you publish your activities to be shared with other teachers. Activities that you publish will appear in the public catalog of activities. That catalog can be searched according to topic, era, activity type, skill, and grade level.

Applications for Education
DocsTeach’s new document analysis activity template could provide you with a great way to guide students through difficult primary source documents. I’ve always found that even the best readers in my classroom need some help when it comes to analyzing primary sources that are more than 100 years old.

DocsTeach now offers thirteen activity templates for teachers to use in building lessons based on the thousands of artifacts available through the DocsTeach website.