EDSITEment Honored by the American Association of School Librarians as "Best of the Best" Website for Teaching and Learning
EDSITEment, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) online repository of humanities-related teaching resources for K-12 classrooms, has been named by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) among the top twenty-five “Best Websites for Teaching and Learning.”
AASL’s Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning recognize high-quality websites that enhance learning and curriculum development and foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation and collaboration.
The list of 25 “best of the best” websites was announced on Sunday, June 27, at the 2010 American Library Association conference in Washington, D.C. AASL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA).
Now in its eleventh year, EDSITEment is a partnership among the National Endowment for the Humanities, Verizon Foundation’s Thinkfinity, and the National Trust for the Humanities. This free-access, user-friendly website showcases over 300 top humanities sites that have been identified and reviewed for content, design, and educational impact in fields such as social studies, history, literature, foreign languages, art, and culture. EDSITEment also creates grade-specific lesson plans that incorporate online resources, original source materials, and interactive learning activities, games, and quizzes for use by K-12 teachers and students.
EDSITEment currently features, for example, a “virtual road trip” to Santa Fe, based upon an ongoing workshop for teachers funded through the Division of Education Programs, which traces the route of El Camino Real, the ancient road connecting Mexico City with Santa Fe, and introduces users to the cultures, histories, literatures, and traditions of the Pueblo people and Spanish colonials. It also offers a lesson plan, tailored to grades 3-5, on the songs, fiction, and social history of the Dust Bowl that integrates interviews with Great Depression survivors and the photographs of Dorothea Lange with information on FDR’s New Deal policies. And it offers older students an interactive map of the Battle of Thermopylae, paired with descriptions from Herodotus and a reconstruction of a Greek phalanx.
The site allows users to browse resources and lesson plans by subject, offers background briefs for teachers to assist them in lesson-planning, and gives suggestions for extending the lesson.