Back to School with DPLA

It’s the first day of school for most kids in the United States, and so a good time to highlight the resources the Digital Public Library of America has ready and waiting for students and teachers this school year. Just like kids, DPLA spent the summer growing and maturing, adding new partners, new staff, and over a half-million items along the way. And we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can be most helpful in the classroom; this fall we will be talking to many educators from K-12 through college to get their advice.

Meanwhile, we encourage everyone to tell a teacher or student this week about these handy DPLA features:

• We host very popular exhibits on American history, ranging from immigration to the Great Depression, from the Gold Rush to the civil rights movement, many of which can be used easily as standalone learning modules in class, or as engaging multimedia supplements.
• We’ve had a number of blog posts detailing what DPLA contains on other critical subjects, like slavery, how it can be used in English 101, and how you can find materials here related to almost any Common Core topic.
• Our energetic community reps have written great pieces on how to use DPLA to do local history, or more broadly how to use it for teaching and research.
• Speaking of local history, why not have students zoom into their community on our map and reflect on an object they find interesting?
• We now have nearly 1.8 million books, on all subjects and in scores of languages, all fully available online, from dozens of libraries across America. We’ve also got tens of thousands of works of art, and maps of every state in the union.
• Need to write a “What I did on my summer vacation” essay this week? You can see how your vacation compared to vacations past by looking at postcards across time on our Tumblr.
• If you’re just getting started using DPLA in the classroom, you can learn all about it with this video introduction or this interactive tutorial. It just takes a few minutes to tour the site and get to know all that we have to offer.

From all of us at the Digital Public Library of America, we wish you a great school year! And don’t forget to let us know how you’re using DPLA for your homework or in the classroom.

Featured image credit: Detail of “Catherine M. Rooney, 6th grade teacher instructs her alert pupils on the way and how of War Ration Book Two,” circa 1943. Courtesy the National Archives and Records Administration (view original record).

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