Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

This teacher-created Forensics site is a stunning compilation of ideas, resources, and laboratory activities to keep you supplied in forensic thinking for a good long time. Lesson plans, worksheets, and even puzzles are available for downloading and printing here. Fuel your interest in forensics and increase your scientific background knowledge at the same time.
This site includes advertising.

tag(s): forensics (13)

Use The Congressional Timeline to look each Congress's activity beginning with the 73rd (in 1933) up until the present. We sometimes forget "Congress" is not a single entity, and there have been over 110 Congresses since the founding of the United States. This is a fairly bare bones site, but with some helpful components. The most interesting is the ability to compare the actions of congress along the top timeline, with major events in history along the bottom timeline. What happened? What did Congress do? The events are all click-able and provide either a brief explanation or links to further information. Another useful function is the ability to filter results by keyword, which eliminates everything not associated with that keyword from the timelines. Also helpful is the ability to highlight events along the timelines by keyword. The keyword fields are completely open, so you will need to experiment a little with your word choice in order to return the most useful results. The timeline is also convenient for research in that it reduces legislative activity to an easy to access summary.

tag(s): branches of government (62), congress (39)

Do advertisers market to boys and girls differently? The answer is obvious: Yes! Beyond that, how does that affect children's development and society in general? This site does not offer a specific answer to those questions, but can make distinctions between boy-girl-centric advertising painfully clear. It is a simple concept: run the audio portion of an ad targeting boys under the video of an ad targeted to girls, or vice versa. Then consider what this "mashup" now communicates. The directions ask you to drag and drop icons; do not drag them to the big open box in the center of the page. Instead, drop one ad on the "audio" icon, and the other ad on the "video" icon; the mashup plays in the middle. If you go to the home page for the project, there are other "mashups" available focused on certain kinds of toys and advertising. You can view in either HTML 5 or Flash.

tag(s): advertising (24), consumers (14), media literacy (102), psychology (67), sociology (22), women (137)

This site offers a highly visual way to draw people of any age into science and a fascination with materials, living things, and forces that make up our world. The collections are the result of an annual competition at Princeton University and were produced as a result of actual scientific research. Click on each image to view a description of the background of the image. Click on other years at the bottom of the screen. These images are simply stunning!

tag(s): images (262), photography (126)

This blog shares many creative activities to encourage thinking outside the box. The activities use many easy to find materials. If you want to make a sculpture out of Twinkies, or create a one man band, then this site is for you. Find links to other creative thinking blogs, too. Promote 21st century design thinking and innovation with activities that look like pure "fun." The sidebar include links to many engineering sites and activities to connect creativity as an important aspect of design and science. Don't miss the sidebar tips to parents and teachers, as well.

tag(s): creativity (91), critical thinking (112)

Today's Document is an excellent daily history site based on an RSS feed from the National Archives Facebook page. Each entry features a historical document or image from the National Archives catalog. Open the entry to view the item shared and additional information, including a short description, record location, and a link to the original Facebook post. The original Facebook posts often include an extra link to a different area within the National Archives with supporting documents.

tag(s): american revolution (82), civil war (134), constitution (87), jefferson (18), lincoln (60), presidents (121), primary sources (117), segregation (18), washington (25)