The purpose of this lesson is for students to analyze and transcribe primary source documents through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a sourcing model in which individuals obtain information and ideas, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of people. Students will transcribe diary and journal entries, letters and speeches from the Library of Congress collection, Mary Church Terrell: Advocate for African Americans and Women. Students should be able to make connections of what they have transcribed to the Civil Rights Movement. The lesson is designed to be done over 3-4 class periods. This lesson may be adapted to any of the LOC collections on the crowd sourcing homepage, https://crowd.loc.gov/. Students will be assigned to write for purpose: narrative, descriptive, expository or persuasive. Students will be evaluated on purpose, viewpoint, distinguishing features, organization, development and writing tasks.
When my students were researching collectively and sharing ideas with each other it drastically increased their retention of information learned. Not sure if it was the process of crowdsourcing or social pressure, or a combination of both that caused students to recall what they had learned. Analysing primary sources also caused for greater engagement because they saw history playing out in real life. After students completed transcribing Mary Church Terrell’s diary and journal entries, letters and speeches they wanted to continue to analyze other entries.
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This is a creative strategy for engaging students to analyze primary sources. Your lesson plan is comprehensive covering a range of topics. I am interested in the students’ responses and experiences using crowdsourcing, especially with your observation that There is a better retention of what they have learned. I look forward to future posts on this use of social media with primary sources. Thank you for a most interesting post!
Robert Eadie
, this is the first time I've seen an actual classroom lesson on student use of the crowdsourcing project, and I think it's truly useful. Thank you! I was happy to see that you included both English/Language Arts standards and U.S. History standards, making the lesson perfect for any kind of American Studies course or cross-curricular teaching.
Yesterday I was looking into the WordSift software recommended by 
Amy Wilkinson
in her recent post in the TPS Tech Talk group. It occurred to me that one way to build vocabulary around a historic event or time period would be to copy and paste completed Mary Church Terrell transcriptions into WordSift and click on individual words in the resulting word cloud to expand on meanings through WordSift's web of synonyms.
Another idea might be an after-school "Crowdsource Club" in the library.
I think your final sentence says it all: "After students completed transcribing Mary Church Terrell’s diary and journal entries, letters and speeches they wanted to continue to analyze other entries." Very cool!
3 - 5 6 - 8 9 - 12 English/Language Arts Social Studies/History Library crowdsourcing Mary Church Terrell civil rights teaching strategies
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