Case Maker is a free service designed for middle school social studies teachers and their students. Case Maker uses primary sources from the Library of Congress as the basis of activities in which students have to build a case in response to real civics scenarios. For example, the first cast that I tried was about anger toward immigrants. In that scenario students had to use evidence in the form of primary sources to support the claim that many of those who are angry toward immigrants come from families that were once immigrants themselves.
Case Maker has twenty pre-made scenarios that you can assign to your students. You can also use Case Maker to build your own challenge scenarios for students. To give a challenge scenario to your students you have to create a free account on the service. Once you have created an account you can give your students a code to enter to complete a challenge scenario. The code that students enter matches up to your account where you can then see the work that your students do. Students create a case by reading then writing about the evidence available to them in primary sources from the Library of Congress. Watch this video to learn more.
How Teachers Can Use Case Maker from Bean Creative on Vimeo.
Case Maker reminds me a lot of Docs Teach in which you can also create challenges for your students to complete by utilizing primary sources.
H/T to Glenn Wiebe for his review of Case Maker a couple of weeks ago.
