What types of workshops or learning aids does the National Archives provide for teachers and librarians?

Hi Thomas,

NARA has a few great resources for teachers. Your starting place should be the Teachers' Resources page on Archives.gov. This page has links to online exhibits, information about student visits, professional development, and more.

The biggest resource on this page is going to be a website called Docs Teach. Here you can use digitized National Archives records to create different types of activities. There's a variety of types of files - audio/video, charts/graphs/data, images, maps, and written documents are the types you can search by. In addition to searching by type, you can search by historical era, or just keyword search.

You don't need to create an account to browse the documents and photographs, or print them. To create activities, however, you'll need an account. It's 100% free though!

As for professional development, there is a summer institute at the Washington, DC, National Archives location called "Primarily Teaching." Each National Archives location and Presidential Library has a different way of setting up workshops, programs, and other events. The page about Professional Development includes links to the different locations and their information about professional development.

Finally, there are also online/distance learning options for professional development. These can also be found on the Professional Development page. Some of these include recorded webinars for National History Day (great for information even if your students do not compete in National History Day), and YouTube videos.

There is an online workshop coming up on Saturday, April 2 at 11 AM Eastern called "Online Resources for Educators."  It will be repeated on Thursday evening, April 7th at 8 PM Eastern.  Registration is required so you can receive the connection information.  Register at Professional Development Webinars .

We provide both in-person and online workshops:

• You can find information about all of our workshops at http://www.archives.gov/education/professional-development/
• Information about our professional development webinars for educators can be found at http://www.archives.gov/education/distance-learning/professional-development.html
• And information about Primarily Teaching, our summer institute for educators on using historical documents in the classroom, held at our locations around the country and online, can be found at http://www.archives.gov/education/primarily-teaching/