Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies

Site Name: Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies

URL: http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/

Owner/Authorship: Smithsonian Institute (Center for Education and Museum Studies)

Type of Resource: Multimedia source with document and text-base core.  Audio, visual, and other multimedia resources available.  

Description: Website includes various lesson plans and supplementary resources for teachers of all subjects and grade levels.  Includes great videos, audio clips, and other interactive activities based on the social studies subjects.  Similar to other social studies resource sites, but includes more in-depth information.

Uses/Usefulness: Excellent tool for students and teachers alike.  Provides extraordinary volume of texts, documents, video clips, audio clips, and other multimedia sources for teachers to use in their social studies classrooms.  As a social studies teacher, the documents and texts provided in this extensive research library could enhance student retention and understanding in complex social studies subjects and concepts.  For students, this site would be immensely useful while completing research papers, presentations, and projects in social studies classes.  The volume and selection of primary and secondary sources would be quite useful for students completing Document Based Question (DBQ) essays in Advanced Placement social studies courses.  Multimedia sources would also enhance student Powerpoint presentation projects.  

Quality: Website of excellent quality.  Great layout of website with link sections for educators, families, and students.  Excellent use of graphics to guide links and keep the site users interested.  

Point of view/Bias: Limited bias - mainly found in secondary sources and some primary source documents.

Referral to other sources: External and internal links.

Verifiability: Links

Currency: Updated regularly (daily and weekly).

Accessibility:  WAVE (http://wave.webaim.org/) reports 7 accessibility errors - predominantly form labels and image buttons missing.