Over the past nine months, our friends Franky Abbott and Dan Cohen at the Digital Public Library of America have been investigating the educational use of their platform by talking to other online resource providers (including us here at the Smithsonian) as well as K–12 and undergraduate teachers, with the goal of better understanding how to serve this audience. From their report:

We learned that educators are eager to incorporate primary sources into instructional activities and independent student research projects, but we can better help them by organizing source highlights topically and giving them robust context. We also discovered how important it was to educators and students to be able to create their own primary-sourced based projects with tools supported by DPLA. From other education projects, including many supported by our Hubs, we learned that sustainable education projects require teacher involvement, deep standards research, and specific outreach strategies.

I can't recommend enough that you check out their full report: Using Large Digital Collections in Education: Meeting the Needs of Teachers and Students (PDF), for useful findings across the GLAM sector.