Using Digital Content
We believe students should be creators with technology and not just consumers, so FCIT provides a wide range of digital assets for students to build their projects and, consequently, their understanding. But with well over 100,000 pieces of free digital content for the classroom, FCIT’s collections can be a bit overwhelming. The purpose of this blog is to highlight important areas of digital content and provide suggestions for using these digital “building blocks” in the classroom. Expect to find posts featuring FCIT’s clipart, photo, audiobook, and map collections among others. Your guide for this blog is Dr. Roy Winkelman.
Basic Counting Resources
FCIT has a great collection of counting resources for early childhood ed. There are photos, numeral sets, drawings, audio counting rhymes, posters, and more. Just one problem—they're scattered all over various FCIT websites. For this post, I've done the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Using Digital Content
Teaching and Learning with Technology