Toolkit for Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making in K-12 Settings History Explorer http://historyexplorer.si.

edu/

Smithsonians History Explorer is a web site that is a joint project of the National Museum of American History and the Verizon Foundation. It contains hundreds of lessons, activities, interactives, and other resources for teachers, students, and anyone else interested in history. The lessons are linked to National Center for History in the Schools standards and can be selected by grade level, resource type and historical era. Resources include artifacts, primary sources, worksheets, links to other websites and more. In the lesson I examined, students use visual, analytical and interpretive skills to examine primary source photography and a map to learn how highways affected life in the 1930s and 1940s. The activities provide opportunities for thinking critically about their own neighborhoods, examining cause and effect relationships, historical analysis, conducting original research, decision making, identifying historical problems and make connections to the present. While the lessons relate to national history standards, I saw no linkage to Common Core standards. The site is free.

National Geographic Education

http://education.nationalgeographic.com/

This web site has ideas, activities, lessons and units for teachers, students and families. Lessons are filtered by intended audience, grade level and subjects. Students use prior knowledge, readings, questions, and maps to consider multiple perspectives, consider long-term impacts and think critically about topics such as westward expansion. Lessons include teacher instructions as well as readings and maps with discussion guidelines for students. Subjects addressed in the site are Social Studies, Science, Health, Language Arts, Math, Arts and more. The lessons have handout worksheets. Even though this appears to be a cutting-edge type web site, 7 of the 9 questions on a worksheet I examined were of the type that required students to list, identify or otherwise give short-answer responses. Two of the questions required some level of interpretive response by the student. It appears that while this web site has some great stuff in it, teachers will be required to do some work up-front in order to make the most out of this site, which is free.

Edudemic http://www.edudemic.com/the-4step-guide-to-critical-thinking-skills/

This web site contains a page with a four-step, fill in the blank

visual with promps and action words to help the student through the process. This seems to be an excellent tool for a PBL activity. The four steps are: Knowledge-identification and recall of information Comprehension-organization of thoughts, selection of facts/concepts; interpret and paraphrase Application-use facts/apply principles; solve problems and give examples Analysis-separate topic into components; deconstruct, examine and infer This site contains lots of other really good stuff and you should already be familiar with it. But this is the first I had seen this page and it seems like it would be very useful. Its free, easily accessible, and has a visual that would probably have to be re-formatted and reproduced to be useful.