I'm the distance learning librarian at Greenfield Community College, and (unofficially) the archivist here as well. I've worked previously as a librarian and/or archivist at a number of other institutions around MA and CT, including Amherst College, Wood Memorial Library & Museum, Bunker Hill Community College, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. I have an MSLIS from Simmons College and a BA in History from Cornell University, and am the author of the book South Windsor, part of the Images of America series from Arcadia Publishing.
This is a lesson plan that centers around a 30-minute activity that gets students thinking and talking about the primary sources they create as they go about their daily lives, in order to prepare them to understand and contextualize the primary sources they encounter in historical research. They will also learn skills that can be transferred to future archival research. This works well as part I of a two-part interaction with classes. Typically, I go to their classroom for this lesson, meeting…
This is designed as a 75 minute lesson plan. It isn’t tied to specific course content, but can be tailored to a particular course and scaled to shorter or longer class sessions. It is designed as more of a theoretical, reflective introduction to concepts of privacy and security than as a nuts-and-bolts or tech heavy workshop, and it includes a debate activity entitled "The Rewards and Risks of Convenience." It could also be used as part 1 in a two-part workshop series in which the second…
This is a lively small-group activity suitable for intro-level classes in one or two-shot sessions, but easily adaptable for use with high schoolers. The goal of the activity is to demystify information evaluation and get students to generate their own criteria by which to evaluate the reliability of information and information sources. Students will also discuss the ways in which these criteria are contextual and may vary by situation.