Overview
The Texas History for Teachers (TX4T) project provides Texas social studies teachers and students access to authoritative, evidence-based historical content and best-practices pedagogical resources for teaching and learning Texas history. The long-term TX4T vision is to produce a full, free Texas history curriculum that combines the very best of historical knowledge, educational pedagogy, and accessibility with all of our content mapped to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards.
Roadmap
To that end, TX4T is building a broad suite of historical and pedagogical resources (all curated by leading historians and educators) that are freely available online, organized into 15 chronological “units” that correspond to historical eras identified in the TEKS. Within each unit on the TX4T site, teachers will find:
- An overarching unit plan detailing historical themes and a TEKS-referenced curriculum guide.
- A series of interconnected lessons that center whenever possible on primary sources. Lessons are designed so that they can be used by teachers either as an entire lesson-set or as stand-alone individual lessons that can be adapted to any classroom.
- A series of professionally produced videos narrated by a historian that provide scholarly background and context about major people and events identified in the TEKS.
- A series of curated primary sources documenting both people and events named in the TEKS that are both age- and content-accessible for the classroom.
Organization
All materials in each TX4T unit (lessons, videos, and primary sources) are mapped to the TEKS, so K-12 teachers and districts across Texas can meet all content requirements set by the state. In addition to exploring TX4T content by historical units, teachers may also explore our resources by TEKS standards. TX4T materials are also intended to support the needs of teachers in charter schools, private schools, and home-school parents.
Student Focused
The project is focused on making these educational resources as widely available as possible. Whenever possible, TX4T pedagogical materials are offered in both Spanish and English, as well as accommodated versions of lesson plans to support students with learning differences.
Development
Texas History for Teachers is being developed by the University of North Texas as a partnership between UNT’s Department of History and UNT Libraries, and particularly UNT’s The Portal to Texas History. The project’s educational mission is also being supported by a number of foundations and organizations, as well as educators and historians from across the state of Texas.
The development of the TX4T site and materials is ongoing, but we are releasing our content as it is developed in order to support as many teachers as possible. Anyone interested in updates to the TX4T site is encouraged to subscribe to The Portal to Texas History newsletter.
Privacy and data
In order to provide the best service possible, we make use of certain services and data storage techniques that deserve privacy disclosures:
- We track and analyze data about usage trends of the site using Google Analytics and SiteImprove. We use this information to make improvements to the site over time. You can effectively block this by setting the Do Not Track directive in your browser, using a content blocker, or Google’s Opt-Out Browser Add-on or other similar strategies.
- The site’s search autocomplete stores a limited amount of data about the site’s content in your browser’s local storage. No personal information is contained in this data.
- In some cases we rely on 3rd party servers to deploy or host content. The most notable of these are the video provider YouTube, 3D mapping service Matterport, and the survey platform Qualtrics, but we rely on a handful of other third-party services to deliver fonts, JavaScript, etc. These services may track user behaviors and are outside of our control.
- Although you can share our content via email and social networking sites, we do not integrate with social networking sites in a manner that allows them to track you.
- On some pages with maps, the browser may ask for your location using a standard prompt. Providing us with access to your location allows us to add a marker to the embedded map and show relative locations to you/your students, and the subjects identified on the map. You can change how this information is used in your browser’s settings.
Technology Requirements
In order to make use of this site you need to be using a “modern” browser. We support only the latest “evergreen” versions of browsers available on major operating systems.
In order to view and downloadable documents, a PDF reader such as adobe acrobat, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint are required.
In some cases we may provide versions of downloadable content in special formats, typically as accessible media alternatives to text documents. MP3 files are provided as stand-alone files for playing in the browser using standard controls, and other text-documents may require specialized readers unique to their circumstances.
Video Content & Players
The site makes use of both YouTube and The Portal to Texas History to host video content since some school districts block access to the former service on their networks and devices.
Wherever possible we provide text-based alternatives to video content with captions/transcripts edited by a real person. In some cases we may not have captions available on the same days as first availability but aim to do so as soon as possible. Please contact us for media and accessibility related questions.
Credits
The contents of this site are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Map Attribution
Interactive Maps appearing on this site are powered by leaflet with base layer data provided by the following: Esri, Aerogrid, Earthstar Geographics, ESA, FAO, Garmin, GEBCO, HERE, IGN, IGP, INCREMENT P, Maxar, METI, NASA, National Geographic, NOAA,NRCAN, UNEP-WCMC, USDA FSA, USGS, OpenStreetMap contributors, and theGIS User Community.