Texas Tides: Digital Learning Consortium

The TIDES (Teaching, Images and Digital Experiences) Program offers a digital gateway to rich historical, cultural and scientific resources held in Texas and Mexican libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, private collections, state parks and wildlife preserves. These resources (photographs, scanned documents and artifacts, video and more) are accompanied by custom-made, standards-based curriculum material and are freely available to teachers, students, and researchers worldwide. The TIDES Program was developed to make humanities collections of East Texas available digitally and to combine the expertise of cultural heritage professionals with the needs of educators to create a Website with the desired access to TIDES' digital collections. Phase one of the TIDES program highlighted the need for point of view information regarding Spanish and Mexican occupation of Texas, the addition of sound and video components to hold the interest of K-12 students, available lesson plans for expanded subjects and grade levels, digital resources through the 20th century and more teacher enrichment opportunities. The TIDES Program has expanded to include science, bilingual and culture based resources. Audience specific access to the TIDES image database is in development.