Beyond Words - A Library of Congress Lab Experiment

The Library of Congress Labs is a website that hosts online experiments based on collections of digital artifacts housed by the Library of Congress. One of the experiments that should be of interest to US History teachers is the Beyond Words project.

Beyond Words is an online project designed to identify illustrations in WWI-era newspapers. The project also seeks to create captions for illustrations identified in the newspapers. The project is open to anyone who would like to contribute by using the marking and transcribing tools provided by the Library of Congress. To get started you just need to go to the Beyond Words website then choose a collection of scanned newspapers to look through.

Applications for Education
Contributing to the Beyond Words project could be a great way to get students interested in newspaper archives. Browsing through the newspapers to find illustrations doesn't feel as intimidating to some students as a task in which they have to read through dozens of pages of 100+ year old newspapers.

Create Interactive Diagrams on Quizlet

Earlier this month Quizlet, a popular flashcard service, added a new interactive diagram feature. This new feature can be used by students and teachers to create review activities that are based upon pictures and charts. Clicking on a point on an interactive Quizlet image will reveal the name or term clicked. You can then "flip" the flashcard just as you would with any other Quizlet flashcard. Multiple interactive elements can be added to each picture or diagram that you upload to your Quizlet account. This interactive map of Europe is a great demonstration of what can be done with the new interactive diagram feature in Quizlet.


Applications for Education
The option to review their Quizlet flashcards in the context of a larger diagram is a nice improvement. Learning about the parts of a cell or reviewing the locations of cities and states are perfect uses for the new interactive diagram feature in Quizlet.

There are a couple of other services on the market that also provide tools for creating quiz questions in the form of an interactive diagram. Those services are GoFormative and TinyTap.