STAR Ideas
Do your assignments ask students to demonstrate information fluency or simply copy information and answer knowledge level questions? Create challenging assignments.
STAR (Simple, Technology Application Resource) Ideas use quality online resources to promote information fluency and reduce the amount of time students spend searching for information and increase their time on high level critical and creative thinking activities.
Go to STAR Ideas: Simple, Technology Application Resource Ideas. Explore the suggested activities and assignments. Brainstorm ways to bring an activity to a higher level.
Identify Digital Collections
Seek out digital collections in your subject area and grade level.
Subject Area Collection Starters
Museum and Archival Collections
- Smithsonian Image Gallery - photographs, slides, drawings, postcards, stereographs
- Canada's Digital Collections
- Smithsonian
- American Memory
- National Archives - Online Exhibits
Art
- AICT - Art images for teaching Ancient, Medieval Era, Renaissance & Baroque, 18th - 20th Century, and NonWestern.
- ARC Art Renewal Center Museum - Search for an artist
- Web Gallery of Art - European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods
History
Music
- Classical Music Archives - listen to the great composers
- Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project - search and browse
- Freeplay
- Laura's MIDI Heaven
- Magnatunes
- PBS Kids Music
Science
- NOAA Photo Library - science, oceans, atmosphere
Social Studies: Culture
General
- FreeFoto - Search by topic or browse categories
- FreeImages
- FreeStockPhotos
- Pics4Learning - Organized by school topics
Ephemera Resources
If you like reading the cereal box or the back of your concert ticket, you're attracted to ephemera. Kids love to collect vacation brochures at hotels and adults enjoy bumper stickers even if they won't want them on their car. Ephemera are primary sources such as playbills, programs, brochures, bumper stickers, tickets, menus, and other printed materials. They are generally free or inexpensive printed materials that weren't designed to last. Use the ones you find on the web and create your own. Read the Introduction to Printed Ephemera from the Library of Congress.
Ephermera Collections
- An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and other Printed Ephemera from Library of Congress
- Advertising Ephemera (1850-1920) from Duke
- Vietnam War Ephemera Collection from Library of Congress
- Lessons Using Emphemera: Library of Congress
Menus
- Walt Disney World menus. List of all the restaurants and prices.
- Durham Menus. Very easy to use website with links to menus with prices. Full-color.
- New York City Restaurants. Analyze the cuisine of restaurants with foods from around the world. Onscreen menus and PDF files are provided for each restaurant. Prices are included.
- Google Images: Restaurant Menus. Visuals of menus from across the web. Also do a Google Images search for Children's menu.
- Historical Menus
- Children's Menu from Holiday Inn. Can you guess the time period?
- Colorado Menus Collection
- Lessons Using Menus: Cooking Up Descriptive Language
Audio and Video Resources
Although some schools have access to United Streaming, there are other resources for one.
- Communication and Language
- American Rhetoric - 5000+ text, audio, and video of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, and more. Don't MIss - Top 100 Speeches
- History
- American Memory from Library of Congress
- Ease History - Historical videos and photos organized by theme
- National Archives Videos
- Science
- States Digital Collections
- Utah Collections Multimedia Encyclopedia
- SURWEB (Utah) - multimedia presentations, images, sounds, and movies
- Washington - Special Collections: University of Washington
- General
- Video Classroom - a digital library of classrooms using technology
- Learner.org
- Open Video Project - across content areas
- Online Clips from Thinkport - browse by content areas
- Teacher's Domain from WGBH - multimedia resources for the classroom and professional development (lots of great videos and interactives)
- Live Cam
- Birdhouse Network Cam
- Bald Eagle Cam and Blog
- San Diego Zoo
- TryScience Live Cams - Multiple Cameras
Explore a collection outside your content area and make a standards connection.
For more, try Escrapbooking and Multimedia Seeds.
Promote Deep Understandings
As you design assignments use the following questions to encourage high level thinking.
Application and Analysis
- What is the most important idea, issue, or main point? Why?
- Can you compare and contrast the concepts, people, places, things, or events? How are they the same and different?
- Which concepts, people, places, things, or events are most important? Why?
- Can you give me an example and a non-example? How are they different?
- How is this like another situation, time, or place?
- What is the sequence of events? Why are they in this order?
- Can you describe how the pieces, parts, and elements relate to the whole?
- How do the concepts, people, places, things, and events relate to each other? How would you connect them?
- Can you think of another way to explain the concepts, people, places, things, and events?
- Can you solve the problem?
Synthesis - Invention and Creation
- Can you think of an analogy or metaphor?
- Can you tell the story or describe the situation from a different perspective using new characters, settings, situations, problems, and solutions?
- Can you organize, categorize, and arrange scraps of information and ideas related to concepts, people, places, things, or events in a new way?
- Can you formulate a plan?
Evaluation, Reflection, Prediction
- Which concepts, people, places, things, or events do you like or dislike? Why? What criteria did you use?
- Why do you think the people acted and the events occurred the way they did?
- Do you agree or disagree? How did you decide? What criteria did you use?
- How do the people, places, things, or events rank? Why? What criteria did you use?
- What are the priorities? How did you decide?
- How would you resolve the controversy or difference of opinion?
- What did the people learn from the event? What did you learn?
- What do you think happened before and after? Why?
- What would you predict happened next? What evidence supports this view?
- What would you did in the same situation? Why?
Web-Based Activities
Explore ways to organize your questions, approaches, and web resources into a meaningful web-based activity.
Connect deep thinking with the digital collections above. Select a resource associated with a set of standards or essential questions. Use the questions above as you design a deep thinking assignment. Consider options for web-based activities such as hotlists, pathfinders, web worksheets, tutorials, and WebQuests.