Photos of the Month: Two Libraries
International Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on January 27. Over the past several decades, I’ve taken thousands of photos of Holocaust-related monuments across Europe for one of our projects. Most such monuments, of course, are intended to memorialize the...
African-American Digital Content Collections
Resources for African-American History Month Each year since 1996, the President of the United States has proclaimed February to be African American History Month. Its origins, however, go back to the 1920s when Dr. Carter Woodson and the Association for the Study of...
Cutout People for Digital Narratives
One of the most effective ways for students to gain (and demonstrate) understanding is through the creation of a digital narrative. Although digital narratives can be used in any subject area, I especially like to see them used in History classes. Students are great...
Photo of the Month: A Tree in Winter
This is a photo of a tree in winter in Western Pennsylvania. Depending on the age level and background knowledge of your students, this photo can be a springboard into understanding something that at first seems pretty mysterious. How does a tree survive a cold...
Winter Pictures and Poetry
Whether you consider Winter to start on the first of December or the winter solstice (December 21 or 22), here are some poems and pictures appropriate for classroom use. The poems are available in both MP3 and PDF formats from the Lit2Go website. The pictures are from...
Converting Raster Clipart to Vector
The ClipArt ETC website includes over 70,000 images for classroom use. The majority of the images are scans of illustrations from 19th-century textbooks, but there are also many thousands of vector illustrations created by FCIT staff. I frequently receive questions...
Photo of the Month: Council House at Mission San Luis de Apalachee
I took this photo about 20 years ago at Mission San Luis de Apalachee in Tallahassee, Florida. The structure on the left is a reconstruction of the Council House. The one on the right is a reconstruction of the Chief’s House. The Council House was the center of...
November is Native American Heritage Month
For the past 30 years, November has been celebrated in the US as Native American Indian Heritage Month. We have assembled a variety of digital resources from FCIT’s collections to support classroom activities related to Native American Indian heritage. The...
39 Recorded Speeches and the Reasons To Use Them with Your Students
The Lit2Go free audiobook site contains over 5,000 audio passages including book chapters, poems, short stories, essays, fables, memoirs, and speeches. Most of these genres were originally created as the written word. Some, such as fables or folk tales started out as...
NASA Mobile Quarantine Facility
This mobile quarantine facility (MQF) was one of four built by NASA for astronauts returning from the Moon. A converted Airstream trailer, the MQF contained living and sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Quarantine was assured by keeping the air pressure...
Signs for the Times
Normally in this space, I share a digital resource for students and teachers. Today, I’d like to share a resource collection that was originally created for students and teachers, but may prove even more useful for administrators and staff of schools and...
Reading Photos and Drawings
At first glance, individual ClipPix ETC galleries of historic drawings or recent photographs of old buildings might not seem to have much application to school subjects. However, matching up architectural drawings and photos of the same location provides some very...
Photo of the Month: Espada Aqueduct
The Espada Aqueduct is a part of the irrigation system that supplied water to the Spanish Mission Espada in San Antonio, Texas. The aqueduct was built in the mid-1700s to carry water over Piedras Creek. The Espada acequia fell into disuse in the 1880s, but was...
Photo or Illustration?
FCIT provides over 100,000 copyright-friendly images for students and teachers to use in the classroom. The two largest collections are ClipPix ETC (our stock photography collection) and ClipArt ETC (our collection of illustrations—mostly black and white line...
Hidden Gem: 4,000 Drop Caps
ONG BEFORE THE PRINTED BOOK and before our modern conventions of paragraphs, sentence punctuation, or even spacing between words, writers of manuscripts would mark the start of a new section with a large (and often embellished) initial letter. These decorative...
Photo of the Month: Sunflowers
Sunflowers always fascinated me as a child. I’d try to trace a spiral of florets (or seeds if later in the summer) outward from the center, but then suddenly the spirals would all seem to go in the other direction. And then, for a moment, I could see both...
Photo of the Month: Skew Arch Bridge
This bridge is less than 200 years old, but it isn’t substantially different from bridges built 2,000 years ago. The arch bridge is one of the earliest forms of bridges. I am fascinated by bridges because they often combine both engineering and aesthetics. The...
Lit2Go: The Soundtrack for Your Students’ Next Movie
We recently received a request from the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument to use our Lit2Go recording of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in a video they were preparing about the Monument. Their finished video can be...
Lit2Go: Grade 12 Reading Activities for Home and School
Parents, if you have children at home due to school closings or vacation periods, the Lit2Go free audiobook website is a great resource to keep students reading and learning. You’ll find plenty of age-appropriate reading passages, audio files, and activity...
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Using Digital Content
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