160 Free Lesson Plans on Teaching With Historic Places
I’m going to Philadelphia next week. I’m going to attend the ISTE Conference, but while I’m there I’m also going to visit a few historic landmarks that I’ve not visited in a long time. One of those landmarks is The Liberty Bell. While looking up the visiting hours for the Liberty Bell visitor center I […]
Five Good Collections of Historic Maps for Classroom Use
Last week I wrote a blog post featuring the newly published historic map collection hosted by the Internet Archive. That collection, the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, is the latest of the historic map collections that I’ve featured on this blog over the last fifteen years. Here are some others that I’ve featured and used […]
I’m Feeling Lucky – Around the World With Google Earth
Google Earth is one of my all-time favorite tools for teaching geography and history lessons. Two of my favorite ways to use Google Earth in the classroom are outlined below. From voyages to games to simple measuring tools, the web version of Google Earth has a lot of neat features that can help students learn […]
How to Use Seesaw to Annotate Historical Images
In my previous post I wrote about and shared a video about using Jamboard to annotate historical images. Another way have students annotate historical images is by adding their voice comments to the images. That can be done through the use of Seesaw. In Seesaw students can upload images then draw and type on the […]
Unfolding History – A New Library of Congress Blog
The Library of Congress has started a new blog called Unfolding History. The blog is written by the staff of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The purpose is to highlight interesting manuscripts and their backstories or greater historical context. The first Unfolding History blog post features a couple of 1972 documents […]
15 New Primary Source Activities from DocsTeach
DocsTeach has been one of my go-to places for U.S. History lessons since the day that I first discovered it years ago. Not only does DocsTeach host a large, curated collection of primary source documents it also offers templates for developing online activities about those documents. Additionally, DocsTeach offers hundreds of premade primary source lesson […]
Fifteen New Primary Source-based Lessons from Docs Teach
DocsTeach has been one of my go-to resources for U.S. History lessons for many years. DocsTeach offers more than 1,500 primary source activities to use in elementary, middle, and high school history lessons. Additionally, DocsTeach provides tools for creating your own online lessons using primary sources from the National Archives of the United States. This […]
How to Find Historical Comics and Create Lessons With Them
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Docs Teach that featured the idea of creating history lessons that incorporate historical comics. That email sent me to Docs Teach where there is a small collection of historical comics. Since Docs Teach is a project of the U.S. National Archives all of the comics […]
A Tool to Simulate Text Messages Between Historical Figures
One of my favorite tool on ClassTools.net is the Fake SMS Generator. The Classtools Fake SMS Generator is free to use and does not require students to register to use it. In the video below I demonstrate how to create a fictitious text message exchange between historical characters. As I mentioned in the video, the […]
Presidential Historians Survey Ranks the Presidents of the United States
The Presidential Historians Survey is a ranking of U.S. Presidents based on the responses of dozens of Presidential historians as surveyed by C-SPAN. The survey asks historians to rank the past Presidents of the United States according to ten leadership characteristics. Some of those characteristics are vision/ agenda setting, persuasion, and moral authority. Abraham Lincoln […]
Use Historical Images to Spark Discussions
One of my favorite ways to spark students’ interest in a history lesson is to have them look for interesting historical images. I’ve found that interesting images can prompt good conversations which in turn lead to good questions for my students to research the answers to. One of the ways that I’ve carried out those […]
A Great Journal for History Teachers
The Library of Congress has quite a number of great resources for teachers and students. The Student Discovery Sets are favorite amongst my favorite resources that I’ve featured in the past. That collection of resources was recently updated by the LOC. The recent additions to the Student Discovery Sets include iBooks about the New Deal, scientific […]
5 Online Activities for Teaching With Primary Sources
As a history teacher one of my favorite yet challenging things to do was introduce my students to primary sources. It’s great because it reveals to them a whole new world of research opportunities. There’s nothing better than a student saying, “wow! Mr. Byrne, look at this!” At the same time learning to read, evaluate, […]