Wisconsin Historical Society

Connecting to the Classroom Offers Teachers a Powerful New Online Learning Tool

Students at Longfellow School in Madison, 1930

History teachers throughout Wisconsin have a powerful new tool — literally at their fingertips — to create lesson plans, design activities and field trips, and generally make their American and Wisconsin history curricula more vibrant and relevant to their students. The Wisconsin Historical Society has created a new Web site, specifically for teachers, that provides them with focused content culled from the vast online educational resources scattered throughout the Society's overall Web site.

Called Connecting to the Classroom, the Web site organizes its content based on Wisconsin Model Academic Standards for American and Wisconsin History. Those standards, as specified by the Department of Public Instruction, provide teachers with specific educational goals to guide the formation of their core curriculum. Connecting to the Classroom identifies the abundance of educational resources that already exist within the Society's Web site, and pulls together all the most useful information for easy online access by teachers in one location.

"We have long recognized that we have a wealth of educational resources on our Web site, but until now finding specific content could prove elusive because it was decentralized," said Bobbie Malone, who directs the Society's Office of School Services. "What Connecting to the Classroom does is to identify every one of those resources, then indexes them in a searchable database that allows teachers to create a wide variety of learning tools as individual as their students are," said Malone.

Connecting to the Classroom provides one-stop access to photographs, classroom-ready lesson plans, class activity and field trip ideas, and primary source material available for free download from the Society's Web site. A unit on civil rights, for example, can utilize actual copies of Freedom’s Journal, the first African-American owned and operated newspaper in America, to demonstrate what life was like for African-Americans in the early 19th century. Online resources such as these can help a teacher turn a text book-driven class into a more engaging experience that allows students to actively take part in their education, all the while helping teachers abide by state academic standards.

The user interface for Connecting to the Classroom offers a clean and orderly list of Society-owned educational attractions — in Madison and around the state — plus a topical list of historical subjects from which to choose, ranging from agriculture and mining to Civil War and maritime history. Following one of the links generates a list of possible classroom activities, relevant collections and primary sources, topical photographs and lesson plans, school group tours, and Society publications appropriate to the subject matter. As additional educational content is added, the online database will grow to accommodate it.

Connecting to the Classroom was developed by a cross section of Society staff over a period of several months, integrating the expertise of professionals in different disciplines to create an educational resource that will benefit teachers and students throughout Wisconsin.