PrimaryAccess

A great tool for social studies, PrimaryAccess allows users the ability to take primary documents and create three different presentations.  PrimaryAccess was designed for use in K-12 classrooms to aid in teaching content knowledge, critical thinking skills and even writing or storytelling skills. Teachers can set up and manage class activities and materials with ease.  Here is a description of each presentation tool:

"PrimaryAccess MovieMaker enables you to combine text, audio and images into compelling personal narratives and digital stories, with a simple movie-making process. Steps like scripting, recording and saving are entirely Web-based--no software to install--and the movies are easy to retrieve and share."

 
"PrimaryAccess StoryBoard enables you to create comic strips and slideshows by combining images, thought bubbles, props and actors. All steps are entirely Web-based--no software to install--and the comics are easy to publish and share."

"PrimaryAccess Rebus makes it easy to create a Rebus using primary source documents. A Rebus (Latin for ’by things”) is a written story that uses pictures as parts of the text. PrimaryAccess Rebus encourages students to explore primary sources by creating crops of those sources and using them to tell a story."

All images are made available from the Library of Congress.   You can use any of these presentation tools without an account.  If you want to create activities and manage classes you can use their Teacher Tools page to create a classroom of students, choose and upload images for students to use, browse other creations by teachers and students, and several other features as well.

PrimaryAccess is an initiative at the Center for Technology & Teacher Education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.