Public Education

Online Resources

The U.S. Constitution & the Bill of Rights: On-Line Resources (pdf)

Notes for the teacher . . .

For the second year, the ACLU Bloomington Education Committee has prepared an annotated list aimed at providing teachers with a variety of instructional material concerning the United States Constitution available on the Internet. Teaching about the Constitution and its twenty-seven amendments can be a daunting task; we hope that this list will help smooth the way.

These selections deal with the origin of our most fundamental documents and the history of the founding era, or with questions that arise from the application of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in our own time. We have tried to be as even-handed as possible in such selections, offering resources with differing and even conflicting points of view for you to present or to exclude from your classroom as you see fit.

Some of the sites on the list are quite simple in their structure and educational outlook, and others are complex and detailed; in all cases it is well to remember that the Internet is inherently ephemeral and that content may not be entirely reliable.

In last year’s workshop edition of this list, we included a separate section that concerned questions about religion and with student expression in the public schools. This year we have included a section emphasizing voting rights in an election year.

Many websites contain hyperlinks leading to still other resources. For want of a better term, the word “portal” has been used as a quick way to indicate that beyond the original door there are many others.

We hope that this list will be of value in using Internet resources. A version in PDF or MS Word form, with links to all the addresses on the list, is available by contacting davidwwiley@sbcglobal.net, or by downloading from http://public.me.com/dwiley3.

Education Committee
ACLU Bloomington