Next week, my US I class will begin looking at the British colonies.  Jamestown, the first lasting British settlement in North America, is naturally our starting point.

I was looking for some kind of activity to have the students do when I stumbled upon a great website - Virtual Jamestown.  I haven’t worked out the entire lesson plan yet, but I’ll probably post the outcome when I’m finished.

I spent a good hour or two poking around the site and it definitely seems like an interesting resource to me.  Some of the resources would be better suited for a college student doing research, but at least part of the website is perfectly suited for a high school classroom.

The most interesting part, I thought, was “Interactive Jamestown.”  Going to that link will take you to an interactive map that shows the original Jamestown settlement and a bunch of other information that you can overlay on top of it.  You can see the different exploration expeditions, you can see the major Native American settlements in the area, or you can see the British settlements over a span of time.  Another interesting feature is looking at the names given to the bodies of water - many of which are still similar today.

Another point of interest here is the panoramas.  There are two virtual panoramas that you and your students can explore.  One is based on a contemporary drawing of a Native American village.  Artists rendered a 3-d version of the village and then created a Flash video that takes you through a short tour.  They’ve also reconstructed Fort James, and you can click your way through the fort to get a feel for the layout.

The rest of the material seems suited for higher level academics.  For example, there is a collection of artwork featuring Native Americans, and each piece has a fairly long commentary.  Suitable for college research, but I think it would bore high school students to tears.

One last feature, which kind of bridges the gap, is the contract records.  There is an online database of indentured servant contracts for the area.  You can enter in some information (town of origin, occupation, destination, etc) and get a list of contracts.  This would be very useful for a college research paper, but you might be able to find a use for it in high school.  Perhaps it would be of interest to overview the different occupations that indentured servants took.

Regardless, the site itself is a must-see for anyone teaching US History.  If you’ve got access to computers, you should try to fit this into your classroom.  The interactive maps are a great way to incorporate technology and geography into the social studies curriculum.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Resources, Internet, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.