HistoryLink.org Education Initiative

“History has something to teach all of us, young and old. It contains not only the record of how our world and local community arrived at the present but also the momentum of events, forces and personalities that will shape things to come.”
                                         — Walt Crowley.

HistoryLink.org in partnership with Heritage 4Culture has developed an enhanced Education Resource featuring valuable curriculum materials and other important resources for educators and students.

HistoryLink recognizes the growing importance of our online encyclopedia of Washington state history as a resource to teachers and students. We estimate that one-third of HistoryLink.org’s total traffic is made up of K-12 teachers and students. In 2008, we celebrated our 10 years anniversary and by hosting our first HistoryLunch to support an Education Initiative. This initiative would map out a plan to focus outreach and service in schools and to expand our content offerings tailored to classroom needs.

Education Initiative Goals:

• to hire an education director to reach out to teachers and involve them in determining the content that would be most useful to them on HistoryLink.org's Study Aids page;
• to use this information to redesign our Study Aids page to provide educators with more of what they need;
• to provide teachers with training and individual support to enable them to make better use of our state encyclopedia;
• to produce new and exciting curricula;
• to make it even more widely known that this resource is available.

Two years later, how have we done?

The first HistoryLunch was a successful launch for our Education Initiative. The money raised at that event provided a foundation to begin building a more effective resource for educators and students.  Representatives from King County’s 4Culture were in attendance at the HistoryLunch and approached us about partnering with them on this Education Initiative.

2009 Accomplishments:

• Entered into a formalized partnership with 4Culture in January 2009
• Hired an Education Director to manage Education Initiative.
• Designed, organized, and executed a program to engage educators across the state and to get their feedback on tools and resources they needed for teaching K-12 students.
• Used feedback to design a new Education Resource that includes downloadable curriculum plans and provides teachers with links to numerous other resources, including Field Trips, Heritage Education Resources, Professional Development, and many Student Resources.
• Posted new original curriculum content beginning in February 2009. We designed our first curriculum to teach students about the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. This exciting new material (the result of our collaboration with 4Culture, with additional funding from the Washington State Department of Commerce) represents an innovative approach to curriculum development by a team of respected King County heritage education professionals. This is now available free of charge on HistoryLink.org, along with five other new curriculum tools and serves as a model for future curriculum development.
• Made collaborative arrangements with organizations that are producing curriculum for distribution of these materials on HistoryLink.org’s Education Resource.
• Reached over 800 educators across the state and gained input re: Education Resource through presentations, conferences, workshops, and internet surveys.
• Partnered with Seattle Times Newspapers in Education Program to feature A-Y-P curriculum in a 2 page full color pullout newspaper section that reached over 375,000 readers, teachers, educators, and students.

2010 Accomplishments:

• Entered into 2nd year of Education Initiative partnership with 4Culture
• Designed and posted the new Education Resource in January 2010.
• Partnered with Seattle Times Newspapers in Education on a 12 week education/history project featuring Bartell Drugs history and on a fall Women’s Suffrage Project.
• Recruited over 250 teachers to our subscriber base. We recognized that this is an important component of the overall outreach plan.
• Launched an aggressive outreach program using email, our subscriber letter, list serves, brochures, the press, conferences, and other educational venues, among other means, to inform educators about our new curriculum resources.
• 1600+ educators reached through participation of Education Team in conferences, workshops, History Day competitions
• 800+ educators reached via email database
• 1200+ HistoryLink.org subscribers reached week (1/3 educators)
• 600+ heritage educators reached via newsletters and blogs
• 375,000+ Seattle Times subscribers and King County teachers