Tag: Social Studies

All About Venice – Another Post Inspired by my Daughters

A few days ago while driving home from seeing a community theater’s musical production of The Little Mermaid one of my daughters asked me “why does Venice have canals instead of roads?” It was a question that I was happy to answer. The question also inspired me to revisit some items on the topic that […]

An eBook for History Teachers and History Students

At the start of every school year I like to review search strategies with students. If you like to do the same and want some new ideas to try this fall, take a look at my eBook Teaching Search Strategies to History Students.  In Teaching Search Strategies to History Students I outline activities that you can […]

Seven ClassTools Templates to Try This Year

ClassTools has long been a favorite resource of mine for creating all kinds of fun, online activities for social studies classes. As the new school year approaches it’s a good time to take a look at seven of my favorite ClassTools games and activities templates.  Play Your Dates Right is one of the templates that […]

Great Debates and Taylor Swift

EconEdLink is a resource that I’ve recommended to social studies teachers for many years now. In addition to great economics lesson plans like this one about lemonade stands and this one about owning your first car, EconEdLink provides professional development opportunities throughout the year. Next week EconEdLink is hosting two free webinars for teachers. The […]

Hello History – Have a Chat With Hundreds of Historical Figures

I’m taking the week off to do a bunch of fun things with my kids. While I’m away the most popular posts of the year so far will reappear. Hello History is a new AI app that I wrote about last week. Almost immediately after I published my blog post about Hello History I started […]

Math, Science, History, and Search Lessons Based on Baseball

 Baseball is my favorite professional sport to watch. The Red Sox have been my favorite team for as long as I can remember which is why I still occasionally look through the baseball cards I collected as a kid. And going to last year’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony for David Ortiz was one of […]

A Good Tool for Mapping Census Data

Earlier today I was looking for a dataset that I could use in a new data visualization tool that I’m testing out. That quest took to me the website of the U.S. Census Bureau. It was there that I went down a rabbit hole of looking at data. Eventually, I stumbled into a mapping tool […]

An eBook for History Teachers and Their Students

Earlier this year I listed the educational technology topics that I’m still passionate about after all these years. One of those topics is search strategies and discovery tools for students. To that end, I’ve recently updated my e-book on Teaching Search Strategies to History Students. In my updated e-book Teaching Search Strategies to History Students […]

Short Lessons About the 4th of July

Everywhere I look this weekend I see signs and mentions of 4th of July weekend. My daughters (ages 5 and 6) have noticed them as well. That inspired my oldest to ask while we were driving home from Santa’s Village yesterday afternoon, “what’s 4th of July?” Of course, I was more than happy to explain […]

How to Install Google Earth Pro on a Mac

A few weeks ago I shared directions for adding Google Drive videos to Google Earth tours. The demonstration that I gave was done with Google Earth Pro on my Mac. That demo prompted an email from a viewer who needed some help installing Google Earth Pro on her Mac. To answer that email I made […]

Three Good Ways to Map Spreadsheet Data

In my previous post about how to create a story map I featured a tool called StoryMap JS. That tool is great for making story maps that have no more than about twenty scenes. Any more than that and the process becomes a bit cumbersome and tedious. Fortunately, there are tools that you can use […]

How to Create a Story Map

A couple of days ago I published a post about a story map titled 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. That post is already one of the most popular things I’ve published this year!  Viewing 1,001 Novels: A Library of America reminded me of a free tool that students can use to create story maps. […]

1,001 American Novels Mapped

1,001 Novels: A Library of America is an ESRI story map developed by Susan Straight. The story map features short reviews of 1,000 American novels. Each novel is geolocated on a map of the United States. The story map is divided into geographic regions. You can also view the entire map at once.  Susan is […]

Turn Pictures Into Digital Map Pins

Felt.com is a digital mapping tool that launched late last year and has since impressed me with both its ease of use and its plentiful features. The latest feature added to Felt that I really like is the option to take any of your pictures and use them as placemarkers or pins on your maps.  […]

An Acoustic Atlas of the Wild West

Acoustic Atlas is a Montana State University Library project that features an ArcGIS Storymap. The Acoustic Atlas storymap is an audio and visual tour of Montana’s four ecosystems. As you scroll through Acoustic Atlas you will see read text and see pictures of the four ecosystems. While scrolling you will also hear the sounds of birds, […]

57 Google Earth & Maps Tutorials for Teachers and Students

Upon the publication of my latest video about how to add Google Drive videos to Google Earth Pro my playlist of tutorials on using Google Earth and Google Maps grew to 57.  In my playlist of 57 Google Earth and Maps tutorials you’ll find directions for everything from the basics of navigation to creating historic […]

How to Create Around the World With Google Earth Tours

The Amazing Race is the only reality game show that I’ve watched with interest for as long as it has been on television. Years ago I created a classroom game based on the same premise of the show. This spring I updated that game with some new graphics and new challenges and then published it […]

An eBook for History Teachers and Their Students

Earlier this spring I listed the educational technology topics that I’m still passionate about after all these years. One of those topics is search strategies and discovery tools for students. To that end, I’ve recently updated my e-book on Teaching Search Strategies to History Students. In my updated e-book Teaching Search Strategies to History Students […]

A Good Way for Students to Visually Compare the Sizes of Countries and States

My students here in Maine always think of our state as being a big place and it is big in relation to the rest of New England. Compared to our friends in the west, Maine is a small place. Similarly, they sometimes have trouble understanding the size of the lower 48 states compared to Canada. […]

Play Your Dates Right – A History Timeline Game

ClassTools.net has many great online game templates for history teachers to use. Play Your Dates Right is one of the templates that I like to use to create a game that is focused on helping students recall the sequence of historical events. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create a simple timeline-based […]

Breaking News With ClassTools

Breaking News is one of the many great tools available on Russel Tarr’s ClassTools.net. Breaking News is a template for creating fake breaking news screens like those that you might see on CNN or BBC News.  Through the template you can add a news headline, a ticker, a location, and custom background image. After completing the […]

Create Animated Timelines in Google Slides

One of my most popular Google Slides tutorials is a video about how to use Google Slides to create a timeline. A follow-up to that video demonstrates how to use the animation tools in Google Slides to add animations to a timeline. In the following video I demonstrate how to create an animated timeline in Google […]

A Geography Lesson About Strange Borders

Belgian Farmer Accidentally Moves French Border is a fun little story and geography lesson in one. It’s almost exactly what the title says. A farmer moved a stone that was in his way when plowing a field. It just happened that the stone he moved is a marker for the border between two small towns in […]

48 Digital Mapping Tutorials

Even though I write a lot about Google Earth and Google Maps, there is more to digital mapping than just using those tools. In fact, there are some great digital mapping tools not made by Google that students can use to create things like historic map overlays, map and timeline combinations, and map-based stories.  In […]

DOGOnews and Free Comic Book Day

DOGOnews is a student news site offers features articles for K-8 students. DOGOnews covers current events stories in the areas of science, sports, entertainment, and variety of topics that fall under the banner of social studies. Teachers can find stories by browsing the categories, filtering by grade level, or filtering by grade level.  This morning when […]

Join Me for a Search Strategies Webinar Tomorrow

Do you teach middle school or high school social studies classes? Have you ever had a student say to you, “Google has nothing on this” or “I can’t find any information about this?”  If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, you’ll want to join me in a webinar tomorrow evening (Eastern Time) that […]

GE Teach – Make Side-by-Side Map Comparisons in One Browser Tab

GE Teach is a great map tool that is developed and maintained by a high school teacher in Texas named Josh Williams.  GE Teach has gone through a bunch of iterations over the years and the latest version is better than ever. On GE Teach students can compare two maps side-by-side. Students can select from gallery […]

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 […]

Search Strategies Webinar Next Tuesday

Do you teach middle school or high school social studies classes? Have you ever had a student say to you, “Google has nothing on this” or “I can’t find any information about this?”  If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, you’ll want to join me for next Tuesday’s webinar all about teaching search […]

Create Historic Map Overlays With These Free Tools

Yesterday morning I shared a collection of more than 100,000 historic maps for classroom use. In that post I mentioned using those maps to create digital overlays on current maps. Google Earth provides a couple of ways to do that. Felt.com is another digital mapping tool that can be used for the same purpose.  In […]

Five Things You Can Teach Through Geocaching

Geocaching is one of the things that I spend a good bit of time talking about in both my workshop and in my webinar about blending technology into outdoor learning. Geocaching is a great activity to do to get kids outside for hands-on learning experiences. Here are five things that you can teach through geocaching […]

This AI Tool Generates Reading Comprehension Questions for Any Article

QuestionWell is a new AI tool that will generate reading comprehension and guiding questions for just about any article that you specify. Questions created by QuestionWell can be saved in a document or exported to a handful of popular quiz apps including Kahoot and Quizziz.  There are two ways that you can use QuestionWell to […]

Lesson Plans and Videos About Patriots’ Day and the American Revolution

As I wrote in my previous post, there are two things that I write about at this time every year. One of those is income taxes. The other is Patriots’ Day and the American Revolution. That’s what this post is about.  Patriots’ Day here in Maine, in Massachusetts, and in a handful of other states […]

Good Resources for Teaching and Learning About Income Taxes

There are two things that I always write about at this time of year. One of those is Patriots’ Day and the American Revolution. The other thing is income taxes. In this post I’ll share some resources for teaching and learning about income taxes in the United States. Tax Help for High School Students A […]

gotFeedback – An AI Tool for Providing Feedback on Writing

gotFeedback is a new tool for providing your students with feedback on their writing. As the title of this post stated, gotFeedback uses artificial intelligence to help you provide your students with feedback on their writing.  To use gotFeedback you can either upload a document (PDF or Word) or paste the text of a document […]

Have a Chat With Hundreds of Historical Figures

Hello History is a new AI app that I wrote about last week. Almost immediately after I published my blog post about Hello History I started to get questions about it. To address a bunch of those questions, I created the short video overview that is embedded below.  Video – How to Use Hello History […]

Projection Wizard – See How Maps Distort the World

Projection Wizard is an interesting tool developed by Bojan Šavrič at Oregon State University. The purpose of Projection Wizard is to help cartographers select the best map projections for their projects. To use the Projection Wizard select a distortion property from a menu appearing to the left of the map. Then use the highlighting tool […]

Hello History – An AI App for Chatting With Historical Figures

Hello History is a new iPhone and Android app that lets you chat with historical figures. The list of characters with whom you can chat ranges from pop culture icons to artists, politicians, and civil rights activists.  Hello History uses AI in a manner similar to that found when using AI tools like ChatGPT. You […]

A Great PD Opportunity for Civics Teachers in the U.S.

Summer might feel like it is a long way right now. But now is the time to start thinking about and planning for professional development you might do this summer. To that end, the National Archives is now accepting applications for the 2023 Civics for All U.S. Teacher Institute.  The 2023 Civics for All U.S. […]

Two Options Explained

A few weeks ago I published a short video that I produced as an introductory explanation of stock options. Dabbling in options trading is a hobby of mine as is producing various types of explanatory videos. Earlier this week I made a follow-up to my video introduction to stock options. This new video explains the […]

How to Use Street View Imagery in Canva Presentations

Earlier this week I published a tutorial for making your first presentation in Canva. After you and or your students feel comfortable with the basics, you may want to start exploring some of the advanced features available within Canva. One of those is the ability to embed interactive Google Maps and Google Street View imagery […]

Three Ways to Share Google Maps Views in Google Classroom

Google Maps is one of the tools that I always list as a must-have for history and geography teachers. It provides an easy way to show students multiple, detailed views of the significant natural and human-made landmarks they’re learning about in your classroom.  Projecting them on a big screen in the front of your classroom […]

Great Art Explained

Despite the efforts of my friend Maggie, I don’t always understand what makes one work of art great and a similar-looking one fit for display in a Hilton Garden Inn. I thought about that last weekend when I came across a YouTube channel called Great Art Explained. The channel seems to have been made for […]

Three Ways to Quickly Map Spreadsheet Data

I recently came across an older Towards Data Science article about ten ways to represent data on maps. Reading the article reminded me of something that I’ve tried to share with social studies teachers and students over the years. That thing is that a great data set can tell you a lot. A great map can tell […]

Lesson Plans for The State of Union Address

Tomorrow night President Biden will give the annual State of the Union Address. C-SPAN Classroom offers more than one hundred resources for teaching and learning about The State of the Union Address in historical and current contexts. If you don’t have time to review all of the resources that C-SPAN Classroom offers (honestly, who does?), […]

How to Map Spreadsheet Data on Felt

Felt is a multimedia mapping tool that I started using late last year and it has quickly become one of my favorite mapping tools. With Felt you can create everything some simple directions maps to maps that have historic overlays to maps of animal migrations and much more. The latest update to Felt makes it […]

45 Digital Mapping Tutorials

This month I’ve been spending some time organizing the tutorial videos on my YouTube channel. To that end I’m creating playlists that are organized thematically. The latest playlist that I’ve created is titled Digital Mapping. The playlist currently contains 45 tutorial videos covering more than just Google Maps. In the playlist you’ll find tutorials on […]

A New Felt Mapping Tool

A few days ago I shared a neat map of gray whale migration patterns. That map was created on the Felt mapping platform. Felt was one of my favorite new tools of 2022 and is only getting better at the start of 2023.  The most recent update to Felt introduced an easier way to access […]

Gray Whale Migration and More Felt Mapping Ideas

Felt is a multimedia mapping tool that I started using late last year. It has quickly become one of my preferred tools for creating multimedia maps. In fact, at this point I think I like more than Google’s My Maps. The aesthetics of Felt are great and it has a great selection of easy-to-use features. […]

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 Include Google Maps in Your Google Documents and Canva Documents

Canva’s new documents tool has a bunch of great features that I highlighted in a video last month. One of those features is the ability to embed just about anything into the body of your document. In the demonstration that I gave last month I embedded videos and presentations. You can also embed Google Maps […]

StudentCam 2023 – Only Three Weeks Left

When it was announced back in September the entry deadline for the 2023 C-SPAN StudentCam contest seemed so far away. Now that 2023 is here, the deadline feels very close. That’s because it is close! The entry deadline for the 2023 C-SPAN StudentCam contest is January 20, 2023.  Every year C-SPAN hosts the StudentCam video contest for middle […]

How to Create Map Overlays

Felt was one of my favorite new tools in 2022. In fact, I liked it so much that I included it in my Best of the Web for 2022. Felt is a free multimedia mapping tool that I think is easier for first-time users to use than Google’s My Maps or ESRI’s mapping tools. Right […]

Best of 2022 – A Fun Map Puzzle

As I do at this time every year, I’m taking the week off to ski and play with my kids, shovel snow, and generally not think about work. I have some of the most popular posts of the year scheduled to republish this week. New posts will resume in the new year.  MapPuzzle is a […]

Best of 2022 – A Big List of Geography Resources

As I do at this time every year, I’m taking the week off to ski and play with my kids, shovel snow, and generally not think about work. I have some of the most popular posts of the year scheduled to republish this week. New posts will resume in the new year. This week is […]

New Features of the LOC’s By the People

By the People is a Library of Congress project that I’ve written about and featured in my Teaching History With Technology courses since 2018. On By the People teachers and students can contribute to crowd-sourcing transcriptions of thousands of primary source documents. Some of the collections that I’ve featured over the years have been campaigns […]

New Base Map Options on Felt

Felt is a new digital mapping tool that I’ve featured a few times in the last month because I think it is fantastic alternative to Google’s My Maps and the web version of Google Earth for creating custom maps. In fact, I like it so much that I demonstrated it in my Best of the […]

Biographies in Infographic Form

Last week while looking for a Canva template to create the copyright guide that I distributed in my Practical Ed Tech newsletter I came across an interesting template titled George Washington’s Biography. It’s a relatively simple template that students could easily modify to create a visual-heavy biography of just about anyone including themselves.  Applications for […]

Ten Good Tools for Making Multimedia Timelines

Last week I read a Book Widgets blog post about fun ways to use timelines in your lessons. Reading that post inspired me to make a new video about making timelines with Adobe Express. It also prompted me to update my list of good tools for making multimedia timelines.  Timeline JSTimeline JS is still my favorite […]

A Free Smithsonian Webinar Tomorrow

Some of my high school history students often took a while to understand the idea that just because a document is an old primary source it doesn’t automatically mean that source is infallible or even an accurate representation of events. They still needed to account for context and the potential for an author’s bias among […]

Two Ways to Make Timelines With Adobe Express

A couple of days ago I read a Book Widgets blog post about fun ways to use timelines in your lessons. Reading that blog post inspired me to create a new video about another tool that students can use to create timelines. That tool is Adobe Express.  In Adobe Express there are two ways that […]

How to Create a Story Map

StoryMap JS is a tool that I’ve been using and recommending for many years. It’s a free tool that students can use to create a story map in a manner similar to Google’s My Maps or the old Google Tour Builder. The difference between those tools and StoryMap JS is that StoryMap JS is much […]

Where I’d Like to Go – A Geography Lesson With Google Drawings

I originally wrote this blog post and recorded the video in 2021 while thinking about icebreaker activities for the start of the school year. The activity is also great for Geography Awareness Week.  As the new school year starts many you may find yourself looking for some new ideas to break the ice and get […]

A Google Earth Lesson With the “I’m Feeling Lucky” Button

Since it is Geography Awareness Week I thought I’d pull a lesson plan from my archives to share with you.  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 about the world. One of those neat features is the […]

Felt – A New Way to Create Multimedia Maps

About a week ago Larry Ferlazzo mentioned a new mapping tool in one of his blog posts. That tool is called Felt. I tried it a few days ago and I have to say that I like it a lot. Felt offers a lot of easy-to-use tools for creating custom maps. Some of the features […]

GeoQuiz History Edition – A Fun and Challenging Geography Game

The start of Geography Awareness Week is nine days away. It’s probably my favorite academically-themed week of the year. (Yes, that’s my social studies teacher background coming through). Over the next week or so I’ll be sharing a bunch of great resources for teaching and learning about geography. To start things off I have a […]

Get Ready for The Great Thanksgiving Listen 2022

During Tuesday night’s episode of Two EdTech Guys Take Questions the topic of audio recording came up. That prompted me to go on a little bit of a tangent (as I’m prone to doing) about The Great Thanksgiving Listen hosted by StoryCorps.  The Great Thanksgiving Listen hosted by StoryCorps is back for the eigth year in […]

A New Primary Source Crowd-sourcing Project from the Library of Congress

By the People is a crowd-sourcing project that enlists the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are housed by and have been scanned by the Library of Congress. Over the years there have been collections of documents from the American Civil War, papers from the American Revolution, presidential papers, documents […]

How to Make Multimedia Maps on Padlet

Geography Awareness Week is coming up in a couple of weeks. In preparation for my favorite academic week of the year, I’ve recorded an updated tutorial on how to make multimedia maps with Padlet.  Padlet is one of the most versatile tools you can put in your digital toolbox. Creating multimedia maps is just one of […]

Finding and Exploring 15 Minute Cities

City Access Map is an interactive map that anyone can use to find and explore the walkability of cities around the world. Specifically, City Access Map lets you explore cities in which residents can access needed services within a fifteen minute walk. City Access Map calls these cities 15 Minute Cities.  You can explore City Access […]

C-SPAN Offers a Free Electoral College Poster

C-SPAN Classroom is one of my go-to sources of ideas for lessons on current events related to U.S. government and politics. Membership in C-SPAN Classroom is free and provides members with lots of digital and physical resources. One of the resources C-SPAN Classroom is currently offering to members is a poster about the Electoral College. This […]

Webinar – Engage and Investigate With the Ken Burns Classroom Collection

As a student and teacher of U.S. History, I’ve enjoyed many of the documentaries produced by Ken Burns (even if my students didn’t always enjoy them). That’s why I’m excited about a new webinar from the National Council for the Social Studies. The webinar is titled Engage and Investigate With Resources from the Ken Burns […]

GeoGeek AR – An Augmented Reality Geography Game

GeoGeek AR is a fun app for testing and developing your knowledge of world geography. As its name and icon imply, the app uses augmented reality to put a virtual globe in any space that you choose. You can spin the globe with your fingers or simply move around the room to see different parts […]

A Fun Timeline Game for History Students

Play Your Dates Right is another great game template developed by Russel Tarr at ClassTools.net. The concept of Play Your Dates Right is that students have to pick the correct sequence of three historical events. The event in the middle of the game template is always the event that actually did come second. Students have […]

Animations of Historical Movements and Patterns

Some of my favorite social studies lesson plans include having students use maps to analyze data and identify patterns in history. Over the years I’ve done this with paper maps and digital maps. Mapping History, produced by the University of Oregon, features lots of animated maps illustrating problems, patterns, and events throughout history. Mapping History […]

Short Lessons on the Differences Between Canadian and American Thanksgiving

Monday is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. It’s about six weeks earlier than it is here in the United States. I’ve celebrated both versions of Thanksgiving and I can tell you that there are a lot of similarities between the two. There are also some differences between them. The following videos provide a humorous look at […]

Eight Good Tools for Creating and Publishing Timelines

Having students create timelines has been a standard in the playbooks of history teachers since the beginning of history. Writing a timeline is a good way for students to chronologically summarize sequences of events and see how the events are connected. When I was a student and when I started teaching timelines were made on […]

Brief Explanations of Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Why Some States No Longer Have Columbus Day

Monday is Indigenous Peoples’ Day here in Maine. In other states it is still referred to as Columbus Day. The Daily Bellringer offers a good video that explains the history of Columbus Day and why some cities and states are now celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead. Watch the video on YouTube and open the description to find […]

Tutorials for Getting Started With the Smithsonian Learning Lab

The Smithsonian Learning Lab allows teachers to create and search for documents, images, videos, interactive animations, and lesson plans from a wide range of Smithsonian-hosted resources. It also lets you create collections to share with others as well as create assignments to give to your students. To start the new school year The Smithsonian published a collection […]

How to Create Green Screen Videos in Canva

A couple of weeks ago Canva held an event to announce a bunch features that were going to be added over the coming months. One of those features is now available in the form of a background remover for video clips. Just like you can use Canva to remove image backgrounds you can now use […]

The WWII Rumor Project – An Activity in Learning Through Primary Sources

A handful of years ago the Library of Congress launched a crowd sourcing project called By the People. The purpose of the project is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are housed by and have been scanned by the Library of Congress. Over the years there have […]

Good Places to Find Constitution Day Lesson Plans

This coming Saturday is Constitution Day in the United States. If you find yourself in need of some lesson ideas for Constitution Day, C-SPAN, DocsTeach, and TED-Ed all offer either lesson plans or resources for building your own Constitution Day lesson plans. Constitution Day Lesson Plans from C-SPAN ClassroomC-SPAN Classroom offers free lesson plans and […]

The Differences Between England, Great Britain, United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth Explained

Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday. The news broke after most on the east coast of the U.S. were out of school for the day. If you find your students asking questions about about her passing, the monarchy, or Great Britain in general, here are some videos that you might find helpful.  The Washington Post published […]

C-SPAN StudentCam is Back for Its 19th School Year!

Every year C-SPAN hosts the StudentCam video contest for middle school and high school students in the United States. This year’s version of the contest was announced yesterday. The theme of this year’s contest is “If you were a newly elected member of Congress, which issue would be your first priority and why?” The StudentCam contest is open […]

Free Webinar and 5 Posters to Help Students Learn to Read Like a Historian

Stanford History Education Group offers lots of great resources for history teachers. They’re hosting a couple of free webinars next week including one designed to help you help your students learn to read like a historian. If you can’t make it to the webinar or webinars just aren’t your thing (after two+ years of virtual […]

History Discussion Prompts for All 50 States

This morning I discovered a new-to-me U.S. History resource created by C-SPAN Classroom. That resource is a collection of video clips and “bell ringers” for every state in the United States. Bell Ringers are short video clips that are accompanied by discussion questions to start a lesson.  In looking at C-SPAN Classroom’s collection of state […]

Lessons on Compound Interest, Rent, and Mittens

Last week I got an email from the Council for Economic Education. The email listed the ten most popular resources on their site. Two of them stood out to me and one of them led me to an additional resource that wasn’t included in the email.  The Compound Interest Calculator is the most popular resource […]

Not Your Average High School Finance Lesson

Thanks to one of Gary Stager’s recent LinkedIn posts I recently learned about an interesting high school investing and saving activity created by William Frey at Fryeburg Academy (just a few towns over from where I live).  A Unit on Saving and Investing for High School Students appears to be created to coincide with the use […]

Create and Share Collections in Bing Maps

Google Maps is one of my favorite tools for geography lessons and for some elementary school math lessons. In fact, next month I’m hosting a webinar all about using Google Maps in your classroom. That said, there are some alternatives to Google Maps that I do use from time-to-time. Bing Maps is one of those […]

Best of 2022 So Far – Custom USGS Maps

I’m taking the weekend off. While I’m gone I’ll be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year so far.  Earlier this year I highlighted the galleries of free to use and re-use media that the USGS hosts. Earlier this week I was back on the USGS site looking in those galleries when […]

Ten Good Templates for Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts Activities

At the start of this year ReadWriteThink re-released all of their popular interactive templates for creating all kinds of things including poems, story plots, timelines, compare & contrast maps, and much more. If you haven’t looked at ReadWriteThink in a while, take a look at these updated templates that can be used for lessons in […]

My Three Favorite Google Tools for Social Studies Teachers and Students

As longtime readers of this blog know, my background is largely in social studies with a smattering of teaching computer science and doing some corporate training. It’s teaching social studies that will always be my first professional love. I’ve also been using Google Workspace tools with students (previously G Suite, previously Google Apps, previously Google […]

Use Google Drive to Comment on PDFs, Images, and Videos

Google Drive can be used to store just about any kind of file that you have. What a lot of people overlook is that you can use Google Drive to comment on those files without converting them into Google Docs or other Google Workspace formats. For example, you can upload a PDF to your Google […]

Ten Topics in Teaching History With Technology

My popular Teaching History With Technology course begins next week. There is still time to register right here.  There are ten big topics that will be covered in the course. All of the lessons in the course can be applied to elementary, middle, and high school settings. These are the ten big topics in the course: Search Strategies […]

Big Mistakes in Cartography

When I taught geography one of the first topics that I covered was map projections and how some of them can distort how we view the world. Of course, a good bit of attention was paid to the Mercator projection. Mercator’s world map is one of a handful featured in a new TED-Ed lesson titled […]

Videos for Teaching and Learning About Memorial Day

Next Monday is Memorial Day. Students often confuse the origin and purpose of Memorial Day with those of Veterans Day. The following videos can help students understand the origins and meanings of Memorial Day and Veterans Day. The Meaning of Memorial Day is a two minute video covering the origins of the holiday in the […]

Teaching History With Technology – Online Course Starting in June

This summer I’m not hosting the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp. I am, however, hosting a some online courses for those who are interested. The first one that I’m hosting starts in June. That course is Teaching History With Technology. Teaching History With Technology is a five-part course that will meet via Zoom at 4pm […]

Classroom Posters – The Rules of Civil Conversation

When I taught civics learning to create sound, well-reasoned arguments and present them in a calm manner was a significant goal in every course. I always tried to remind them that they can disagree with another person’s opinion without attacking the person. This was particularly tricky when my high school students hit upon issues that […]

Five Google Earth Activities to Get Kids Interested in the Outdoors

In last week’s Week in Review I mentioned a new book titled Outdoor Kids in an Inside World. In the book Steven Rinella presents a lot of ideas for getting kids interested and involved in learning about nature. In the first chapter he presents a big list of ideas for things that you can do […]

An Interactive Map of the Roman Empire

A few years ago I wrote about a must-bookmark resource from Stanford University for history teachers and students. That resource is called ORBIS and it has been updated since the last time that I wrote about it. ORBIS is Stanford University’s Geospatial Network Model of the Roman Empire.  On ORBIS students can calculate the distance and travel times between […]

The National Archives to Host Online Professional Development This Summer

The National Archives offers many excellent resources for history teachers. For example, they recently published a new guide to understanding perspectives in primary sources. And this summer the National Archives will be hosting free online professional development events for teachers.  The first event is on July 12th through the 14th. It is the Truman Library […]

A Good Place to Find Old Maps Online

Old Maps Online is an online map that you can browse and search to find historical maps to view online, to download, and to print. You can search the map by entering a location or you can just pan and zoom around the world to find historical maps. In the video embedded below I demonstrate […]

Living Wage vs. Minimum Wage

Last night I was reading a discussion on FlyerTalk that got into the question of whether or not tipping should be an expectation of hotel housekeeping staff. That discussion veered off into a bigger question of minimum wage versus livable wage. That discussion reminded me of two resources that I’ve highlighted in the past to […]

Understanding Perspectives in Primary Sources – A New National Archives Resource

Once they understood the difference between a primary and secondary source, helping students understand the context, meaning, and purpose of primary source documents was one of the things that I enjoyed the most when I taught U.S. History. To that end, I often used resources from the National Archives Daily Document RSS feed to spark […]

How to Create a Custom Map on an iPad

Yesterday morning I answered an email from a reader who wanted to know if it was possible to create Google Earth projects on an iPad. Unfortunately, the iPad version of Google Earth allows you to view existing projects, but doesn’t allow you to create new projects. Fortunately, there are other ways to create custom maps […]

Ten Fun Things for Students to Map

Last week I published a video about how to record a Google Earth tour in your web browser. That’s just one of many tools that students can use to create multimedia maps. A few other options include using Scribble Maps, Padlet maps, and Google’s My Maps tool. Creating a map with one of these tools […]

How to Record a Google Earth Tour in Your Web Browser

The online version of Google Earth has improved a lot since it was first launched back in 2017. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t have a built-in recording tool like the one found in the desktop version of Google Earth. The solution to that problem is to create a project in the web version of Google Earth […]

Create Your Own USGS Maps

Earlier this year I highlighted the galleries of free to use and re-use media that the USGS hosts. Earlier this week I was back on the USGS site looking in those galleries when I noticed something new to me. That something is the USGS National Map Viewer.  Don’t the name fool you, the USGS National […]

Social Studies Teachers! One Month Left to Apply for an Awesome Fellowship

I shared this news back in January, but that feels like so long ago now that some tulips are starting to poke out of the ground in my yard. This summer C-SPAN Classroom is hosting their annual teacher fellowship program in a virtual format.  C-SPAN’s Summer Fellowship program is now open for applications. Those who […]

This Could be a Great Opportunity for a History Teacher

The Library of Congress has a program called Innovator in Residence that provides funding for one person to develop innovative tools that incorporate artifacts housed by the Library of Congress. Over the last few years I’ve featured a couple of tools that were developed through the Innovator in Residence program. Those are Citizen DJ and […]

Chronicling America – A Great Place to Find Historic Newspapers

Chronicling America is digitized newspaper archive hosted by the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America collection contains millions of copies of newspaper pages printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword. You can read, download, and print […]

Newspaper Map – Find and Read Newspapers Published Around the World

Newspaper Map is a neat tool for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the […]

How to Add Videos to Google Earth Projects

I’m currently developing a lesson plan that is loosely based on the reality television show, The Amazing Race. In my lesson students have to use a series of clues to find locations in Google Earth and then complete a task or challenge before adding a placemark to their Google Earth projects (tours). They have to […]

Take Your Students on the American Ideals Virtual Field Trip Hosted by Discovery Education

Disclosure: Discovery Education is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com Discovery Education hosts some fantastic virtual field trips throughout the year. These are open to all teachers who want to have their classes attend them, not just those who subscribe to Discovery Education. I’ve featured many of Discovery Education’s virtual field trips over the course of the […]

An Interactive Map of Surnames in Ireland

Mapping the Emerald Isle: a geo-genealogy of Irish surnames is an interactive map depicting the distribution of Irish surnames across Ireland according to the 1890 census. To use the same simply select a name from a drop-down menu in the list and the map will change to show you in which counties people with that […]

A Short Overview of Library of Congress Digital Collections

I reference the Library of Congress nearly every time that I talk or write about searching for historical maps and images. If you know where to look on LOC.gov and how to filter a search, you can find some amazing resources to use in all kinds of history lessons including overlaying historical maps onto current […]

Library of Congress Resources About Ukraine

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve received quite a few requests for resources for teaching and learning about the Russia/ Ukraine conflict. In response to those requests I’ve been directing people to Larry Ferlazzo’s frequently updated list of resources. Today, I found one resource that isn’t on Larry’s list, yet. That is the a […]

eStory – A New Multimedia Timeline Creation Tool

Whenever I see a new timeline creation tool appear on the Internet, I can’t resist giving it a try. So when eStory appeared on Product Hunt a few days ago, I had to sign-up and test it out.  eStory is a free tool that you can use to quickly create multimedia timelines. There are some […]

How to Link Within Google Earth Projects

Google Earth in all its forms has been one of my favorite educational technology tools for well over a decade. The web version of Google Earth has improved significantly since its launch five years ago. One of the relatively new features of the web version of Google Earth is the ability to link to places […]

Three Great Google Maps Features for Teachers

Google Maps is one of my favorite tools to use in history and geography lessons. I’ve been using it for at least as long as I’ve been writing this blog (15 years). Like all Google products it has evolved over time and some features have gone away while others have been added. And there are […]

Take Flight With This Library of Congress Image Collection

The Library of Congress is a great place to find historical pictures, drawings, and maps to use in lesson plans and classroom projects. Finding things on the Library of Congress’ website isn’t always easy if you only use the search function. But the LOC’s Free to Use and Reuse Sets make it much easier to find […]

How Graphs Can Be Misleading

Tools like Canva and even good ol’ PowerPoint make it incredibly easy to quickly create good looking graphs. But as Randy Krum points out in his book, Cool Infographics, a graphic that looks good isn’t necessarily a good graphic. In fact, many times a graphic is made to look good in order to distract from […]

Join Me on Tuesday for Search Strategies for History Students and Teachers

This Tuesday at 4pm ET I’m hosting a Practical Ed Tech webinar titled Search Strategies for History Students and Teachers. If a student has ever said to you, “I can’t find anything about this,” this webinar is for you! In this one hour webinar I’ll share the strategies and techniques that I’ve used with my […]

A Neat Site for Comparisons of Economic Information Between Countries

Seven years ago I wrote about a neat site called If It Were My Home. I came across it again while looking for something else in my archives earlier this week. It still works and still does the same interesting thing that it did when I first tried it.   If It Were My Home will show you […]

New Lesson Plans from DocsTeach

DocsTeach is one of my favorite resources for U.S. History teachers and students. The platform makes it easy to find curated collections of primary source documents and offers great templates for creating online lessons based on those documents. And if you don’t have time to make a new activity, DocsTeach offers hundreds of premade primary […]

How to Create VR Tours of Local Landmarks

I live near a little ski mountain called Mount Abram that is totally geared toward being family-friendly, affordable (seriously, my kids ski the whole season for $20!), and community-oriented. During the weekends when my kids are in lessons I like to skin up the mountain. By skinning I burn a lot calories and I get […]

Search Strategies for History Students and Teachers

If a student has ever said to you, “I can’t find anything about this,” the webinar that I’m hosting on February 15th is for you. On February 15th at 4pm ET I’m hosting Search Strategies for History Students and Teachers. In this one hour webinar I’ll share the strategies and techniques that I’ve used with […]

Wiki History Game – A Fun Timeline Game

Wiki History Game is a free timeline game based on Wikipedia entries. I discovered it on Product Hunt last week and immediately lost about 30 minutes of my day playing the game. The game is a simple one, but an addictive one for history buffs. The premise of the game is to sort events into […]

Top Tools and Activities for Collaborative Learning in 2022

This blog post was sponsored by Lumio, but it features a bunch of other great tools as well.  At this point in the school year and our second school year in a pandemic, we’ve all become familiar with the nuts and bolts of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or whatever other platform your school uses […]

A New Smithsonian Learning Lab Tool for History and Art Teachers

This week the Smithsonian Learning Lab released a new tool that could be very helpful to history and art teachers. The tool is simply called Canvas (no connection to the LMS of the same name). Smithsonian Learning Lab’s Canvas tool lets you build colllections of Smithsonian digitized artifacts and arrange the display of those artifacts […]

ReadWriteThink Interactives Now Work Without Flash!

For many years ReadWriteThink offered a great collection of interactive templates for students to use to create all kinds of things including poems, story plots, timelines, compare & contrast maps, and much more. Unfortunately, the deprecation of Flash caused nearly all of the ReadWriteThink templates to stop working. That is until now! Thanks to Larry […]

About Primary Sources

As a U.S. History teacher one my primary goals was to help students understand the past to understand where we (Americans) came from to understand how we got here and to, hopefully, avoid mistakes of the past. To that end, I frequently had students read excerpts from primary source documents. Sometimes that meant confronting language […]

StoryMap JS – A Nice Alternative to Tour Builder

Like many teachers, I was disappointed when Google deprecated Tour Builder and Tour Creator last year. Since then in my webinar series with Rushton Hurley and on social media I’ve answered a lot of questions from teachers about alternatives to Tour Builder. StoryMap JS is one of the tools that I’ve been suggesting when asked […]

Mark Your Calendar for Three Free Smithsonian Learning Lab Webinars in January

The Smithsonian Learning Lab is a great resource that I’ve featured dozen or more times over the years. Later this month the Smithsonian Learning Lab is hosting three free webinars for teachers who want to learn more about how to use it for online and in-person instruction. All of the webinars will be livestreamed on […]

4,000+ Maps of Military Battles and Campaigns

The Library of Congress housed hundreds of thousands of maps covering a huge array of topics from maps used by fire insurance companies to population density to maps of military battles and campaigns.  The LOC’s collection of maps of military battles and campaigns contains more than 4,000 maps that are free to view, download, and […]

Nine Interactive Maps Depicting the History of the United States

American Panorama is a great resource from the University of Richmond that I first reviewed six years ago. Since then it has expanded from four interactive maps to nine interactive maps of United States history.  American Panorama aims to be an atlas of United States History. Currently, American Panorama features nine interactive maps representing elements and […]

Add Comments to Word Docs to Spark Discussion

Last Monday I shared directions for using Google Drive to add comments to PDF and directions for using Formative to add questions into primary source documents. The idea in both cases is to use those tools to spark dicussion and inquiry when reading primary source documents with students. This can also be done by adding […]

Use Google Drive to Add Questions and Comments to PDFs

In my previous post I shared directions for using Formative to add questions to PDFs. Another option is to use Google Drive to add questions and comments to PDFs.  Adding comments to PDFs in Google Drive is one of those little features that is quite handy but is often overlooked. To add a comment to […]

Use Formative to Build Questions Into Primary Source Documents

Formative is a great tool for creating all kinds of online activities from simple multiple choice quizzes to in-depth examinations for documents. One of the ways that I like to use it is to upload a document and then build questions into the document for students to answer while reading. In this new video I […]

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 […]

How to Annotate Historical Images on Jamboard

From magnetic poetry to collaborative brainstorming sessions to mapping activities, there are lots of ways to use Google’s Jamboard in online and in-person classes. One way that I like to use Jamboard is to have students annotate images that I share with them. In particular, I like to do this to have them add commentary […]

The Future of Flickr’s The Commons

Flickr’s The Commons has been one of my go-to resources for historical imagery since I first wrote about it nearly fourteen years ago. That’s why my heart sank a little bit when I visited The Commons earlier this week and saw a note that read “learn more about the future of Flickr Commons.” Whenever I […]

Seven Ideas for Crafting Comics in History Classes

My first teaching position was as a mid-year replacement for a literature teacher who left to become the head of an ESL/ELL program in another school district. That teacher left behind a stack of comic book versions of Romeo and Juliet along with a note along the lines of “these might help with your reluctant […]

Create and Publish a Multimedia Timeline With Canva

Last week a reader emailed me looking for a suggestion for making multimedia timelines with her middle school students. My usual suggestion of Timeline JS was ruled out because her school use Office 365 and the kids can’t access Google Sheets with school accounts. My other suggestion was to try using Canva to create multimedia […]

Finding a Geographic Opposite

One evening last week my daughters were playing with the globe pillow that is featured in this blog post. They started asking questions about what each place is called and where it is relative to where we live. Answering their questions reminded me of the concept of an earth sandwich.  The idea of an earth […]

A Good Collection of Resources for Teaching the Five Themes of Geography

C-SPAN Classroom is known for offering great resources for teaching civics and government lessons. What you might not know is that C-SPAN Classroom also offers a good collection of resources for teaching geography lessons.  C-SPAN Classroom hosts a collection of bell ringers and lesson plans aligned to the five themes of geography. Bell ringers are […]

My Big List of Resources for Teaching & Learning About American Thanksgiving

American Thanksgiving is later this week. All month long I’ve been sharing Thanksgiving-themed resources and ideas. This post combines all of them into one place. If you have school this week and you’re looking for some last-minute Thanksgiving resources, take a look through this list.  The Science of Thanksgiving Foods The Reactions YouTube channel, produced […]

Scribble Maps – Draw on Google Maps and More Without an Account

To close out Geography Awareness Week 2021 I have one more cool tool to share. Scribble Maps is a tool that I’ve used and recommended for years. As the name implies, you can use it to draw on maps. You can also use it to create multimedia map markers. The best part is that you […]

The Suprising Origins of Thanksgiving Foods

Yesterday morning I published blog post in which I shared an ESRI Story Map of where traditional Thanksgiving foods are grown today in the United States. That story map covers where food comes from today, but it doesn’t cover the historical origins of traditional Thanksgiving foods. That’s an interesting topic of its own. It’s Okay […]

Mapping Where Food Comes From

Where Does Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From? is an interactive storymap that I’ve shared in the past and still find to be a neat resource. The map displays where eight popular Thanksgiving foods are grown and harvested in the United States. The storymap includes a map for each ingredient. Each map shows the locations of commercial […]

My Big List of Activities and Resources for Geography Awareness Week

This week is Geography Awareness Week. It’s one of my favorite weeks of the year! Every year at this time I publish an updated list of some of my favorite games, activities, tools, and lessons to promote geography awareness. Here’s my updated list for 2021.  The first place to start a search for geography awareness […]

How to Overlay Historical Maps on Current Maps

Next week is Geography Awareness Week. Google Earth is my favorite educational technology tool to use to teach history and geography lessons. And one of my favorite things to do with Google Earth is to overlay historic maps onto current maps. It’s a great way for students to see how borders have changed over time, […]

How to Create Multimedia Maps in Padlet

Padlet is one of the most versatile ed tech tools you can put in your digital toolbox. Creating multimedia maps is one of the many things that you can do with Padlet. In fact, there are two ways that you can create multimedia maps in Padlet. The first method is to use the built-in base […]

Resources for Teaching and Learning About Veterans Day

Veterans Day is this Thursday. If you find yourself looking for some quick lessons to review with your students, here’s a small collection for you.  ReadWorks ReadWorks is one of my favorite places to go when I need information texts about a holiday to share with students. ReadWorks has a good collection of Veterans Day […]

NatGeo MapMaker – Create, Share, and Print Custom Maps

National Geographic MapMaker is a nice mapping tool that I’ve been using and recommending for years. It was recently updated with an improved user interface, additional data sets, and more annotation tools.  With NatGeo MapMaker you can create custom maps to display datasets, to compare datasets, to illustrate collerelations, and to illustrate points. National Geographic […]

How to Use Canva’s Image Background Remover

It’s not a secret that I really like the many ways that Canva can be used to create graphics, videos, presentations, and simple websites. Within any Canva template there are lots of neat editing tools including an image background remover. It’s available to anyone who has a free Canva for Education account.  Canva’s image background […]

The Living Atlas of the World

The ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World is a collection of thousands of online, interactive maps representing all kinds of data. The contents of the collection range from relatively simple displays of historical map imagery to complex, displays of data updated nearly live. For example, this map displays active hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons. Another good […]

How to Share Specific Google Earth Views and Turn Them Into Assignments

Google Earth has a lot of great little features that sometimes get overlooked. One of those features is the ability to share a specific location and view of that location. In fact, you can share a specific location and view directly into your Google Classroom. When you share it you can share it as an […]

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 […]

An Interactive Land Use Map

WorldCover Viewer is a new interactive land use map produced by the European Space Agency. The map lets visitors see how land is used worldwide and in specific places. Visitors can pan and zoom to see land use for an area or use the statistics explorer tools built into the map to see land use […]

The United Nations Explained for Kids

A couple of weeks ago I discovered CBC Kids News and I shared a great video that explains what the word indigenous means when referring to people. This afternoon I browsed through CBC Kids News again and found a nice animated video that explains the United Nations to kids.  United Nations Explained is a short […]

I’m Feeling Lucky – A Google Earth Lesson

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 about the world. One of those neat features is the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that is found on the left hand toolbar in Google Earth. Clicking that button will take […]

How to Share Google Arts & Culture Experiences in Google Classroom

Last week Google Arts & Culture published a great online exhibit titled Walk the Great Wall. It’s a fantastic colleciton of Street View imagery and multimedia stories about the Great Wall of China. As I wrote last week, Walk the Great Wall includes detailed imagery of the bricks of the wall, short lessons about the […]

Life on Minimum Wage – A Personal Economics Simulation Game

Almost twelve years ago I published a Google Document that outlines a personal economics simulation that I conducted in my classroom. For many years after that it was the most-requested Google Doc that I published. Then for the last few years I haven’t had any requests for it. In fact, I forgot that I had […]

Tour the Great Wall of China – A New Google Arts & Culture Experience

After Google announced the closure of Google Expeditions earlier this year Google Arts & Culture became the place to go to find much of the virtual imagery that was available in Expeditions. The library of imagery and stories in Google Arts & Culture has steadily grown throughout the year. The latest big addition to that library […]

Transcribing Early Copyright Applications

By the People is the Library of Congress project that was formerly known as the Crowd project. The name changed at some point in the last year, but the purpose of the project remains the same. That purpose is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe historical documents housed the by the Library […]

What Does Indigenous Mean? – And Why Some States No Longer Celebrate Columbus Day

While I was reviewing videos about Canadian Thanksgiving YouTube displayed a suggested video from CBC Kids News. The video is simply titled The Word Indigenous and it provides an animated explanation of what the word indigenous means when referring to people. The video also does a great job of explaining why the word indigenous is preferrable […]

Short Lessons on Canadian v. American Thanksgiving

Monday is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. It’s about six weeks earlier than it is here in the United States. I’ve celebrated both versions of Thanksgiving and I can tell you that there are a lot of similarities between the two. There are also some differences between them. The following videos provide a humorous look at […]

How to Create Comics – A Four-Part MOMA Series

From telling personal stories to summarizing historical events to illustrating creating writing over the years I’ve shared a bunch of ideas for using comics in classrooms. And I’ve shared a bunch of tools for creating comics (resources linked at the bottom of this post). While I enjoy the process of creating comics, I am not […]

A Great Way to Explore Newspapers of the World

At the end of August I shared a couple of neat ways to explore newspapers of the world through interactive maps. Over the weekend, thanks to Larry Ferlazzo, I learned about another interactive map of newspapers from around the world.  Today’s Front Pages is an interactive display of the front pages of nearly 500 newspapers […]

Supreme Court Lesson Plans

C-SPAN Classroom is a must-bookmark for anyone who teaches U.S. History. The large collection of free lesson plans is one of the things that keeps C-SPAN Classroom on the top of my list of go-to resources for more than a decade. And if you’re a member of C-SPAN Classroom (membership is free) you’ll get regular […]

City Guesser 3.0 – More Maps and More Modes

About six months ago City Guesser 2.0 was released. The big news then was a switch from being based on street-level imagery to street-level video clips. Now City Guesser 3.0 is out and it still uses street-level video clips but now offers more games and more game modes than before.  City Guesser 3.0 is played […]

Five Google Earth Features for Teachers

Google Earth has been one of my favorite ed tech tools for more than a decade. Over the years it has evolved as a desktop application and as a browser-based application. The web browser version of Google Earth seems to be getting the bulk of development attention from Google these days so I’ve created a […]

How to Create Custom Coloring Maps

There are plenty of places on the Internet to find free outline maps of states, provinces, countries, and regions of the world. Finding blank outline maps of cities, small towns, or neighborhoods is a little harder to do. If you’re looking for a blank map of a city, town, or neighborhood for your students to […]

Free Presidential Timeline Poster for Your Classroom Courtesy of C-SPAN

C-SPAN Classroom offers some fantastic resources for teachers of U.S. History, civics, and government. One of those resources that has been offered in the past and is available again this year is a free poster depicting a timeline of American presidents. The poster shows each President’s time in office, a short biography, the era of […]

A Critical Thinking Quiz

About a month ago I shared a list of resources for helping students learn to recognize logical fallacies and cognitive biases. One of the resources in that list is Your Logical Fallacy Is. The people who produce that website, School of Thought, recently launched a short, interactive quiz for testing your ability to recognize logical […]

Five Places to Find Dozens of Constitution Day Lessons

This Friday is Constitution Day in the United States. According to federal law all schools that receive federal funding have to teach some type of lesson about the Constitution on this day. C-SPAN, DocsTeach, and the National Constitution Center all offer either lesson plans or resources for building your own Constitution Day lesson plans. Constitution […]

US News Map – A Great Way to Explore Newspaper Archives

Earlier this summer I shared some ideas for encouraging students to do research in digital archives. The U.S. News Map produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia offers another interesting way to encourage students to explore digital archives. The U.S. News Map is based on the Chronicling America newspaper collection hosted by the […]

Three Short Lessons About Labor Day

Next Monday is Labor Day in the U.S. For most of us it is a three day weekend. It is the traditional “end of summer” in the minds of many of us. If you’re planning to answer questions about Labor Day or teach any lessons about it, here are some short videos to add to […]

Three Good Places to Find Current Events Stories for Students

Last week I wrote about using the BBC’s Week in Pictures as a source of current events discussion starters. Following up on that idea, here are some other good places to find current events stories written for kids.  For many years CNN Student News was one of my go-to resources when I was teaching current […]

Exploring Newspapers Through Maps

When I included current events as a regular part of my social studies classes I would always show a map of where a story takes place. The following websites can provide students with a geographic connection to current and historical news stories. Newspaper Map is a neat tool for locating and reading newspapers from locations all […]

Five Ideas for Using Comics in Social Studies Lessons

Creating cartoons and comic strips can be a fun way for students to show their understanding of events and concepts. For the student who is intimidated (or bored) by the idea of writing yet another essay or making another PowerPoint presentation, creating a comic strip is a welcome change. Here are five ideas for using […]

In Pictures – A Good Resource for Prompting Current Events Lessons

Over the weekend while browsing some news articles on the BBC News I was reminded of a good resource that I used for many years to prompt discussion and small research activities in my current events class. That resource is the BBC’s Week in Pictures which is a section of their more general In Pictures […]

How I Created “Vintage” Travel Posters With Canva

In the past I’ve written about using the Library of Congress vintage travel posters collection in Google Earth. Last week I read a new Library of Congress blog post the vintage travel posters collection. Reading that post inspired me try my hand at creating a “vintage” travel poster of my own. Drawing is not a […]

Five Things To Make With Google Slides Besides Standard Presentations

Based on the initial view count, yesterday’s post about creating interactive diagrams in Google Slides seems to be fairly popular. That’s inspired me to put together a list of other ways to use Google Slides besides just making standard slideshow presentations. I’ve made videos about all of the following ideas and those videos are included […]

An Interactive Map of Historical Sites in Every U.S. State

The Traveling Salesman Problem is a website developed by William Cook at the University of Waterloo. The site features interactive maps that chart the short distance between a series of places. One of those maps is of all of the places in the United States National Register of Historic Places, all 49,603 of them.You can […]

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 […]

How to Use Google Scholar to Learn About Inventions and Inventors

Last week I published a blog post outlining five things that students should know about using Google Scholar. One of those things is the option to search for U.S. Patent Office filings.  When you locate a patent filing through Google Scholar you can read the details of the patent application, look at drawings that accompany […]

Using Google Books in History Classes

As the name implies, Google Books is a search engine for locating books. Through Google Books you’ll find books that you can read in their entirety for free and books that you can preview for free. Most importantly, Google Books lets you search for keywords within books. Searches on Google Books can be refined according […]

A Timeline of Mathematics and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

This week TED-Ed published a new video about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. This is the latest in a long list of mathematics video lessons produced by TED-Ed. The timing of the video was perfect for me as I had planned on writing about Mathigon’s Timeline of Mathematics this week. That timeline includes an entry about Gödel’s […]

Short Lessons on the Value of Money

Last week TED-Ed published a new video lesson titled Why Can’t Governments Print an Unlimited Amount of Money? The purpose of the video is to explain how governments, particularly the United States federal government, were able to spend trillions of dollars on COVID-19 economic relief programs in the last year. The video explains the role of […]

Three Ideas for Encouraging Students to do Research in Digital Archives

Yesterday morning I wrote about the challenge of getting students to use resources like academic databases and digital archives in their research. This morning I received an email from a reader who asked if I could share an example or ideas of how to encourage students to use digital archives in their research. The following […]

All Paygrade Features are Now Free

PayGrade is a classroom economy simulation that you can use all year in just about any classroom setting. Recently, PayGrade was acquired by an online investment company called Stash. A result of that acquisition is that all of the features of PayGrade are now free for all teachers and students.  How PayGrade WorksLast year I wrote this […]

Roadside America in a Story Map

The Library of Congress houses the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive. That archive contains nearly 12,000 photographs of interesting roadside attractions all over the United States and eastern Canada. The collection includes pictures of things like gas stations shaped like a dinosaur, windmills that serve as ice cream stands, funky miniature golf courses, and […]

How to Quickly Create Animated Maps

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about new mapping tool called Mult Dev. It’s a free tool that lets you quickly create animated maps. In the time since I wrote about Mult Dev a couple of updates were made to it. The most notable of those being that you now need to sign into […]

Five Activities for Teaching and Learning 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, […]

Seven Good Tools for Creating and Publishing Online Timelines

Creating timelines has been a staple in history teachers’ playbooks since the beginning of history. Writing a timeline is a good way for students to chronologically summarize sequences of events and see how the events are connected. When I was a student and when I started teaching timelines were made on large pieces of paper. […]

A Virtual Tour of Washington With Dr. Jill Biden

Tomorrow at 1pm ET Discovery Education is hosting a free virtual field trip to Washington, D.C. for elementary school and middle school classrooms. The virtual field trip will take students to six landmarks in Washington, D.C. Along the way students will hear from Dr. Jill Biden, Yolanda King (granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. ) […]

Short Lessons About Memorial Day

Next Monday is Memorial Day. Students often confuse the origin and purpose of Memorial Day with those of Veterans Day. The following videos can help students understand the origins and meanings of Memorial Day and Veterans Day. The Meaning of Memorial Day is a two minute video covering the origins of the holiday in the […]

Running Free Rivers

River Runner is a neat website that shows you how a drop of water travels from anywhere in the United States to the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, or the Gulf of Mexico. To use River Runner simply go to the site and click on any location in the United States. As soon as you […]

A Math and Map Challenge

This evening while recording Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions & Share Cool Stuff I was reminded of a neat math and map challenge activity from Mathigon. Here’s what I wrote about it last year.  Mathigon’s map coloring challenge is to use as few colors as possible to color in all 50 U.S. states without the […]

Mult.dev – A New Way to Quickly Make an Animated Map

Mult.dev is a new mapping tool that I recently learned about through Maps Mania. Mult.dev does just one thing but does it very well. That thing is create animated maps illustrating the connections and travel distance between two or more places.  To create an animated map on Mult.dev you do not need an account. You […]

Three Good Options for Drawing on Digital Maps

Creating layers and tours in Google Earth and Google My Maps can be a great way for students to assemble collections of geolocated information to summarize research, create a book tour, or even develop safe walking and biking routes. But sometimes you just need to quickly draw or pin things to a digital map. In […]

Strange Borders – A Geography Lesson

Yesterday afternoon I read an interesting article titled Belgian Farmer Accidentally Moves French Border. The whole story is almost exactly what the title says. A farmer moved a stone that was in his way when plowing a field. It just happened that the stone he moved is a marker for the border between two small […]

New Map-based History Lessons from DocsTeach

DocsTeach is one of my go-to resources for history teachers. I like it so much that I feature it in my Teaching History With Technology course. DocsTeach provides thousands of primary sources that teachers can use to build online and in-person history lessons for middle school and high school students. Additionally, DocsTeach hosts hundreds of pre-made […]

A Handful of Resources for Learning About the Start of the American Revolution

Tomorrow is Patriots’ Day here in Maine, in Massachusetts, and in a handful of other states. It’s a day to mark the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. As a good New Englander with an appreciation of history, every year at this time I like […]

How to View Timelapse Imagery in Google Earth

This week Google made a big announcement about the introduction of new timelapse imagery to the web version of Google Earth. The imagery is part of the “Voyages” section of Google Earth. Within Voyages you’ll find the new timelapse imagery arranged into stories and collections. You can also just browse through it on your own.  […]

12 Good Resources for Learning About National Parks

Tomorrow is the start of National Parks week here in the United States. So I’ve put together the following list of resources to help students learn about individual National Parks as well as the park system on the whole.  A Great Book About the Origins of National Parks Years ago I was camped on the […]

Spark Interest in Local History With These Digital Newspaper Archives

When I was a kid I did yard work for an elderly widow who had stacks of old newspapers magazines that she and her husband collected. Knowing that history was my strongest subject in school, she always had a new, old newspaper (and a glass of fruit juice) for me whenever I came over to […]

12 Fun, Challenging, and Interesting Geography Games for Students

Last year I published a list of geography games for students. Since then I’ve come across a few more interesting geography games and one that I used for years has disappeared. Here’s my updated list of fun, challenging, and interesting geography games for students.  Map Quiz is exactly what its name implies. It’s a quiz game […]

ICYMI – Intro to Teaching History With Technology – Webinar Recording

Earlier this week I hosted a free webinar titled Intro to Teaching History With Technology. In the webinar I introduced my Discovery, Discussion, Demonstration framework and how it can be applied to developing interesting history and geography lessons. More than 100 people joined the webinar. If you missed it, you can watch the recording right […]

Five Collections of Historical Maps

As I mentioned in my previous post, reading this new BBC article about the rediscovery of the first 3D map in Europe prompted me to look through my archives for collections of historical maps. Here are some collections of historical maps that I’ve featured in the past and used in my classroom and or in […]

A Video Tour of 17th Century London in 3D

This morning I read a BBC article about the rediscovery of the oldest 3D map in Europe. The map is a roughly 5 x 6.5 foot slab of carved rock. Reading that article prompted me to start looking in my archives for collections of historical maps. While doing that I came across a video that […]

Free Webinar – Intro to Teaching History With Technology

As announced just a few moments ago during Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff, next week I’m hosting a free webinar titled Intro to Teaching History With Technology.  In this free webinar on April 6th you’ll learn about my Discovery, Discussion, and Demonstration framework for using educational technology and how to […]

Synth Relaunches With a Renewed Focus on Asynchronous Audio Conversations

This week Synth released an updated user interface and a renewed focus on helping teachers and students engage in asynchronous audio conversations. In this post I’ll provide an overview of what Synth does, what has been updated in its user interface, what’s still the same, and how Synth can be used by teachers.  What is […]

PayGrade.io Now Offers Google SSO

PayGrade is a classroom economy simulation that you can use all year. As I wrote last year, unlike some mock economy activities PayGrade can be used in just about any classroom setting. Recently, PayGrade added the option to use your school-issued Google account to sign into PayGrade. This should make it easier for more teachers […]

City Guesser 2.0 – Guess City Locations from Video Clips

For years City Guesser has been a popular geography game in which players have to guess the identity and location of a city based on Google Street View imagery. The new version of City Guesser replaces Google Street View imagery with street level video clips.  In City Guesser 2.0 players are shown video clips (silent […]

Some of my Favorites – Geocaching!

This week is school vacation week here in Maine. I usually take this week off to go ice fishing on Moosehead Lake. Unfortunately, that’s not happening this year. Instead I’ll be “staycationing” and working on some projects around home. While on my staycation I’ll be sharing some of my personal favorite tools. Geocaching is one […]

Some of my Favorites – Historic Maps in Google Earth

This week is school vacation week here in Maine. I usually take this week off to go ice fishing on Moosehead Lake. Unfortunately, that’s not happening this year. Instead I’ll be “staycationing” and working on some projects around home. While on my staycation I’ll be sharing some of my personal favorite tools and blog posts. […]

ClassTools Wikipedia Timeline Generator – Create and Edit Timelines

Russel Tarr, a history teacher and developer of ClassTools.net, recently released a new template called the Wikipedia Timeline Generator. This free tool will take a Wikipedia article and generate a timeline based on that article. That’s not all it does. You can edit the entries on the timeline to correct dates, to edit the information […]

70 Lesson Plans About WWII

A few years ago I visited the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. If ever have a chance to visit, take it! I spent about five hours in the museum and I would have spent ten hours in it if I’d had the time. I wish that every student could visit the National WWII Museum, […]

GeoQuiz – How Many Countries Can You Identify?

GeoQuiz is a new geography game website that was featured on Product Hunt a couple of days ago. GeoQuiz is a simple game that just asks you to try to name as many countries as you can in fifteen minutes. As soon as you enter a country’s name the globe on the screen spins to […]

A Map Projection Game, Video, and Lesson Plans

Last week I shared a new Crash Course about geography. One of the first videos in that course tackles the question “what is a map?” Yesterday, through the Maps Mania blog, I learned about a fun quiz game that could be a good activity for students to complete after watching What is a Map? and […]

What is a Map? – And a New Crash Course in Geography

For as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed looking at maps. Whether it’s a standard Mercator projection printed on paper or a digital map, looking at maps sparks curiosity in my brain. I’m certain that’s why I always enjoyed teaching geography and why I spend so much time today teaching others how to use […]

How to Create a Multimedia Timeline With Padlet

Yesterday morning I published a list of my recommended tools for creating multimedia timelines. Padlet is one of the tools that I included in that list. The timeline templates are relatively new in Padlet so I decided to make a short video tutorial on how to use them. One of the things that I like […]

Six Good Tools for Making Multimedia Timelines

Creating timelines has been a staple in history teachers’ playbooks since the beginning of history. Writing a timeline is a good way for students to chronologically summarize sequences of events and see how the events are connected. When I was a student and when I started teaching timelines were made on large pieces of paper. […]

Wolfram Alpha for Social Studies

Trying search tools besides Google is one of the ideas that I feature in Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know. Wolfram Alpha is one of those alternatives to Google that I frequently mention to teachers and students. Wolfram Alpha is best known as a computational search engine that can help students with questions related […]

How Many People Does it Take to Make a Cup of Coffee?

I drink a lot of coffee! Thanks to the timer on my coffee maker my day usually starts by smelling freshly brewed coffee at 4:47am. Making the coffee is pretty simple task in my house; pour in some water, add some ground beans into the filter, and set the timer. But getting the roasted coffee […]

Daily Artifacts of U.S. History

Earlier this week I was catching up on some RSS feeds in Feedly when I came across this drawing from the patent application for the board game that became Monopoly. That drawing was the featured artifact of the day on the Today’s Document website published by the U.S. National Archives. It’s a resource that I […]

Every U.S. Election Through 2012 Explained

The events of the last 24 hours in Washington DC have stirred emotions in nearly all of us. This morning my students wanted to talk about it in my computer science class (they know that I used to teach social studies). One of my students had heard a reference to the election of 1876 in […]

Virtually Explore America’s Quietest Roads

America’s Quietest Roads is an interactive map created by a road traffic analytics company called Geotab. The map features the quietest state or federal highway in all fifty states. They define quietest as having the least average number of vehicles traveling the road throughout the year 2015.  It’s important to point out to students that […]

Vintage Travel Posters and Google Earth

The Library of Congress offers thousands of historical images and maps that students can download and reuse for free. Most of the images and maps are found in these digital collections. Some of those images are arranged in collections on the LOC site in a section appropriately titled Free to Use and Reuse Sets. It’s […]

Formative Adds New Features for Creating Great Online Assessments

Formative is an online assessment platform that I’ve used and recommended for years. There are two features that keep me coming back to it. First, you can create questions that students respond to with free-hand drawings that they make on their computers or tablets. Second, you can upload documents and images to then add questions […]

Dozens of Bell Ringers to Start Your Social Studies Lessons

C-SPAN Classroom has long been one of my go-to recommendations for social studies teachers. It’s particularly good for those who are developing lessons about civics and government. Bell Ringers is one of the many good resources that C-SPAN Classroom provides for free to all teachers.  C-SPAN Classroom Bell Ringers are short video clips accompanied by […]

City Walks – Hear and See Cities Around the World

City Walks is a neat website that I recently learned about from Larry Ferlazzo. On City Walks you can go for a virtual walk in more than a dozen cities around the world. You can experience the cities with or without sound. You can go for virtual walks in the daytime or at night. At […]

How to Move Google Tour Builder Files Into Google Earth

Last week Google announced that support for Google Expeditions and Google Tour Builder would end in July 2021. I’ve already published a preliminary list of alternatives to Google Expeditions. If you’re looking for alternatives to Google Tour Builder you don’t need to look much further than to Google Earth.  Google Tour Builder includes two options […]

Alternatives to Google Expeditions

Last week’s announcement from Google that Google Expeditions will be discontinued in 2021 was disappointing news for many of us. Since then I’ve answered a handful of questions from people who are looking for alternatives to using the Google Expeditions app. Here’s a summary of what I’ve been saying and suggesting to those looking for […]

How to Find Google Earth Files Without Endless Browsing

This morning I responded to a Tweet from someone who was looking for “plate tectonics virtual experiences for students.” My mind immediately went to using Google Earth. A quick search in my archives and I found this lesson plan calling for using Google Earth to teach plate tectonics and I found this Google Map filled […]

Ten Ideas for Using Google Earth in Your Classroom

In this week’s Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week newsletter I mentioned that in my free handbook I have a list of ideas for using Google Earth in your classroom. If you’re not subscribed to the newsletter or you are and you didn’t have a chance to scroll through the handbook, here’s an excerpt […]

Five Activities for Geography Awareness Week

This week is Geography Awareness Week. This week is one of the many things that I look forward to every November. (Thanksgiving, football, and the end of the first quarter are some of the other things I look forward to). Even though I now teach computer science instead of social studies, I still enjoy good […]

A Couple of Lessons on the Origins of Thanksgiving Foods

A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post in which I shared an ESRI Story Map of where traditional Thanksgiving foods are grown today in the United States. That story map covers where food comes from today, but it doesn’t cover this historical origins of traditional Thanksgiving foods. That’s an interesting topic of […]

A New Collection of 17,000+ Historical Maps and Images

Flickr’s The Commons is a great place to find all kinds of interesting historical photographs from museums and libraries all over the world. Recently, The British Library added a new collection of maps to Flickr’s The Commons. The new collection is called the King’s Topographical Collection and it contains more than 17,000 historical maps and images […]

Short Lessons on the History of Veterans Day

Veterans Day is this Wednesday. If you find yourself looking for some quick lessons to review with your students tomorrow, here’s a small collection for you.  ReadWorks is one of my favorite places to go when I need information texts about a holiday to share with students. ReadWorks has a good collection of Veterans Day […]

Mapping a Thanksgiving Meal

Earlier this week in a blog post about The Great Thanksgiving Listen I mentioned that I love Thanksgiving. So please excuse me if I get carried away with posts about Thanksgiving over the next couple of weeks.  Where Does Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From? is an interactive storymap that I’ve shared in the past and still […]

Two Short Lessons on Checks & Balances

Today is election day in the United States. While the election is fresh in our students’ minds, it is a good day to review how the three branches of federal government work in a system of checks and balances.  In addition to voting for President we’ll also be voting for members of the House of […]

The 2020 Great Thanksgiving Listen

The Great Thanksgiving Listen hosted by StoryCorps is back for the sixth year in a row. This annual event is intended to get people to record audio stories with family and friends. This year there might be a lot more remote recording than in the past, but the goal of the project is still the […]

Learn About Exploration and Compasses by Making Your Own

Today, many of us just use an app on our smart phones when we need to get directions and navigate from point A to point B. Most of our students have never experienced getting directions in any other way. So they may be surprised to learn that we used to use maps and compasses to […]

Time to Fall Back – Short Lessons About Daylight Saving Time and Timezones

This weekend we have Halloween and the end of Daylight Saving Time (in most of the U.S. and Canada). Hopefully, my kids will take advantage of the “extra” hour of time for sleeping.  As I do almost every time Daylight Saving Time begins or ends, I have gathered together a handful of short video explanations […]

Five Last Minute Resources for Teaching About the Electoral College

We’re one week away from the U.S. Presidential election. While citizens cast their votes next week, the final selection happens in the Electoral College in December. That’s a concept that can be tricky for some students to understand. If you’re looking for some last minute resources for teaching about the Electoral College, take a look […]

Story Spheres – Create Immersive Audio Tours of Interesting Places

Story Spheres is a neat tool for adding audio recordings to 360 imagery. Story Spheres lets you upload short audio recordings in which you describe to viewers what they’re seeing, the history of what they’re seeing, and the significance of what’s in the scene they’re seeing. It’s possible to upload multiple recordings. When you’re done […]

5 Digital Mapping Activities

On Monday I shared a couple of tutorials about measuring distances in Google Maps and Bing Maps. Yesterday, I shared a few resources for helping students understand map projections. This morning, I have some more tutorial videos that might help or inspire you to create digital mapping activities to use in your geography or history […]

Map Lessons from Mathigon

Last spring I wrote about Mathigon’s Map Coloring Challenge. That’s not the only map-based math lesson available from Mathigon. Mathigon’s lesson on spheres, cones, and cylinders incorporates map projections.  In Surface Area of a Sphere Mathigon includes an interactive diagram that illustrates the problem that cartographers have when trying to create maps of the world. […]

How to Measure Distances in Bing Maps and Google Maps

This afternoon I received an email from a reader who was frustrated by how slowly Google Earth loaded on her students’ Chromebooks. She had designed some activities about distance that she wanted her students to complete using the measurement tools in Google Earth, but it was loading so slowly for many students that the activity […]

Research Starters from the National WWII Museum

Last week at the end of one of my classes we were talking about how everyone was adjusting to wearing masks all day and social distancing in school. A couple of my students grumbled about it. That grumbling was met by a reply from another student who said, “Guys, it’s not that big a deal! […]

Rank Country – Explore Mapped Demographic Data and More

  Rank Country is a website that features datasets about education, healthcare, infrastructure, tourism, weather, and dozens of other topics. It is easy to browse the Rank Country data maps. Simply head to the site and open the “browse” menu in the upper, left corner of the page. That menu will reveal all of the […]

Cronobook – A Map of Historical Photographs

  Cronobook is a new-to-me website that features a searchable map of historical photographs. The premise of the site is simple and using it is easy. Just head to the site, search for a location, and click on the small images to see them in full size. A little bit of information  including location and […]

Newspaper Navigator – A New Search Tool from the Library of Congress

This week the Library of Congress launched a new search tool called Newspaper Navigator. Newspaper Navigator is an index of 1.5 million images published in newspapers between 1900 and 1963. You can search Newspaper Navigator by keyword and then narrow your results by date and or the U.S. state in which the newspaper was published. […]

Three Good Resources for Teaching Fact vs. Opinion

This afternoon I was talking with a few of my students about TikTok and its new relationship with Oracle. The course of that conversation brought up a lot of “I’ve heard X” and “I’ve read X” statements from my students regarding news about TikTok. As you might imagine would happen with teenagers talking about their […]

Create an Online Philosophical Chairs Activity With Jamboard

Last week I got an interesting question from a reader named Chuck. I’m not sure that my answer or the question has broad appeal, but I found it interesting so I made a video about it. Chuck’s question was as follows: I have been struggling to find a tool that I can use to do […]

Movies on Map – Discover the World Through a Map & Video Combination

I love maps and I love a good video so I had to explore Movies on Map when I saw it featured on Maps Mania. Movies on Map is a site that features videos about interesting places all over the world. You can search for a video according to location on Movies on Map or […]

Short Lessons on the History of Labor Day

This coming Monday is Labor Day in the U.S. For most of us it is a three day weekend. It is the traditional “end of summer” in the minds of many of us. If you’re planning to answer questions about Labor Day or teach any lessons about it, here are some short videos to add […]

A Handful of Videos to Help Students Understand the Electoral College

You can’t go to a news site today and not see something about the upcoming U.S. Presidential election. When you do go to those sites you’ll often find current polling data about the popularity of a given candidate and or the probability of a candidate winning. Those polls don’t always predict who will win because […]

Factitious 2020 – Can You Spot Fake News Stories?

In yesterday’s episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff I shared some information about an update to a favorite resource of mine, Factitious. Factitious is a game that is designed to help students practice identifying real and fake news stories. The 2020 version of the game features stories about COVID-19. […]

DIY Smithsonian Mini Exhibits

The Smithsonian Learning Lab is an excellent resource for social studies and language arts teachers. I’ve been using and recommending it for years. One of its many features is an option to create and share collections of artifacts from the Smithsonian and external sources. And every month the Smithsonian Learning Lab sends out an email […]

Three Ways to Explore the News Through Maps

One of the things that I liked about the old version of CNN Student News is that it almost always included a map to show students where a story is taking place in the world. I tried to do the same whenever I taught current events by showing students a map of where a story […]

Lessons on Map Projections

The maps pages and education pages of the USGS should be bookmarked by anyone who teaches geography. One of my go-to pages within the USGS education site is this collection of 27 ideas for teaching with topographic maps. In the list of lesson ideas you will find suggestions for lessons about typical geography topics like […]

Finding Primary Sources in the World Digital Library

The World Digital Library is a resource that I started using back in 2009. At that time it was just a small collection of about 1,200 digitized primary source artifacts from libraries around the world. Today, the World Digital Library hosts more than 19,000 digitized primary source artifacts to view and download. As you’ll see […]

Using DocsTeach to Create Online Lessons – Free Webinar Next Week

DocsTeach is a favorite resource of mine for U.S. History teachers and students. I used it and it’s predecessor fairly regularly when I was teaching U.S. History. DocsTeach provides an online space where you can create primary source based lessons for your students to complete online or offline. Last fall I published a detailed tutorial […]

Historical Scene Investigations – A Great Way to Get Students to Use Primary Sources

Historical Scene Investigation is one of my favorite resources for U.S. History teachers and students. I’ve used it and referred people to it for years. HSI presents students with historical cases to “crack” through the use of evidence found in the form of primary source documents. Historical Scene Investigation contains thirteen cases in which students […]

How to Create Labeling Activities With Google Drawings and Classroom

Last week I hosted a webinar for a group that I’m working this  summer. One part of that webinar included making online activities for students. I included some of the typical things like Kahoot and Wizer but I also included a demonstration on how to use Google Drawings to make online labeling activities. In the […]

10 Fun & Challenging Geography Games for Students of All Ages

We’re halfway through 2020. This week I’m taking some time off from the blog to work on some other projects. The rest of this week I’m going to re-run some of the most popular posts and videos of the year so far.  Making lists like this isn’t my favorite thing to do nor is it […]

Expedition Everest – 360 Video from National Geographic

National Geographic has one of my favorite YouTube channels. I’ve been fascinated with Mount Everest for as long as I can remember That’s why I was excited yesterday when Nat Geo published a new 360 video about a scientific expedition to Mount Everest. Expedition Everest: The Mission is a five minute overview and introduction to […]

Story Spheres – Create Audio Tours of Immersive Imagery

Story Spheres is a free tool for adding audio to 360 degree images that you own or have the rights to re-use (Creative Commons licensed or public domain). With Story Spheres you can add audio narration and ambient audio to your 360 images. Once you have a 360 image that you want to use, using […]

Explore the Royal Academy of Arts in Google’s Arts & Culture Apps

Google’s Arts & Culture site and corresponding apps make it possible for students of all ages to virtually explore thousands of fascinating landmarks and works of art. This morning Google announced a new collection with the Arts & Culture site. That collection features the Royal Academy of Arts. The highlight of the Royal Academy of […]

5 Things Students Can Do in Google Earth Without Google Accounts

Google Earth has many handy little features that your students can use even if they don’t have Google accounts. Without a Google account your students can customize the appearance of Google Earth, measure distances and areas, change the units of measurement, and share locations and Street Views with you. Of course, they can also use […]

Great Sets of Primary Source Documents for U.S. History Lessons

The Digital Public Library of America is a great place to find all kinds of neat digitized historical artifacts. I recently went down a rabbit hole looking at photographs in the baseball collection and the DPLA’s Boston Sports Temples exhibit. That happened because I was revisiting the DPLA’s Primary Source Sets for teachers and students. […]

Webinar Recording – Intro to Teaching History With Technology

Yesterday afternoon I hosted a free webinar titled Intro to Teaching History With Technology. This webinar featured my Discovery, Discussion, Demonstration framework in the context of history and geography lessons. As the name implies, the webinar provides an introduction to some of the key topics in my online course, Teaching History With Technology. If you […]

A Handful of Video Lessons About Memorial Day

This is Memorial Day weekend here in the United States. Monday is actually Memorial Day. Students often confuse the origin and purpose of Memorial Day with those of Veterans Day. The following videos can help students understand the origins and meanings of Memorial Day and Veterans Day. The Meaning of Memorial Day is a two […]

Homeschool History – A Podcast Series for the Family

About eight years ago there was a BBC podcast series called A History of the World in 100 Objects. It was a good series that featured short lessons about objects in The British Museum. New episodes haven’t been added in years, but the series is still available to listen to online. I mention that old […]

National Parks Games and Challenges – Try Virtual National Parks Bingo

I love the National Parks service that we have here in the U.S. One of the things I’m looking forward to doing with my kids when they’re a little older is to help them explore some of the places in National Parks and National Forests that I’ve enjoyed in my life. My love of the […]

USGS Offers Online and Hands-on Learning from Home Resources

Since I was in elementary school I have enjoyed looking at maps and day dreaming about the places those maps depict. I like maps so much I have a couple of USGS topographical maps on the wall in my office. So whenever the USGS emails me with something new, I immediately investigate it. The latest […]

Explore the Library of Congress on Your iPad

The Library of Congress Collections app is a free iPad app that offers a nice way for students and teachers to explore collections of artifacts housed by the Library of Congress. The collections available through the app are also available directly on the LOC website. The benefit of viewing them in the app is ability to […]

Lessons About Income Taxes

In most years today would be the deadline for Americans to file their income tax returns. This year that deadline has been extended to July 15th because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I already had these resources ready to go for this week so I’m going to share them now rather than wait until July. What […]

A Map Coloring Challenge

Last week Maps Mania shared a collection of online and printable map activities for kids and adults. At the bottom of that collection was a link to Mathigon’s map coloring challenge. The challenge is to use as few colors as possible to color in all 50 U.S. states without the same color touching two states […]

C-SPAN Classroom Offers New Lessons on the Economic Impact of COVID-19

C-SPAN Classroom is a free resource that anyone who teaches U.S. History or civics should have bookmarked. I’ve written about many of their great resources and programs over the years including their annual student video contest and annual summer workshops for teachers. C-SPAN Classroom recently published a new lesson plan that includes a set of […]

Free Webinar – Making Multimedia Social Studies Lessons

Tomorrow at 11am ET I’m partnering with my friend Greg Kulowiec from EdTechTeacher.org to host a free webinar titled Making Multimedia Social Studies Lessons: Audio, Video, and More. Greg taught middle school social studies for many years and is now a leading expert on the use augmented reality and virtual reality in education. I taught […]

How to Measure, Share, and Download 3D Models from the Smithsonian

Last week the Smithsonian launched a new collection of nearly three million digital artifacts that you can download and reuse for free. I published a video about how to access and search through that new collection. For the sake of brevity I didn’t include everything that you can do with the artifacts in the Smithsonian’s […]

Gribrouillon – Freehand Drawing on Online Maps

For many years I’ve recommended Scribble Maps as a no-account-required alternative to Google’s My Maps. Scribble Maps lets create freehand drawings on digital maps. Today, thanks to Maps Mania, I learned about another tool for making freehand drawings on digital maps. That tool is called Gribroullion. Using Gribroullion is a straight-forward process. Simply go to […]

Google Earth Now Works in Firefox, Edge, & Opera!

I shared this news in my podcast earlier today, but just in case my podcast isn’t the first thing you listen to in the morning, I’m excited about the web version of Google Earth finally being available in Firefox, Edge, and Opera. The Tech Lead Manager and a software engineer for the Google Earth announced […]

The Electoral College Explained by Common Craft

We still have a long way to go in the party primary and caucuses before the Democratic nominee for President will be chosen. And then we have even longer until we go to the polls to choose a President of the United States. And a President is finally elected through the Electoral College. How the […]

Do Politics Make Us Irrational? – A TED-Ed Lesson

As the 2020 Presidential primaries and caucuses roll on more there is no avoiding political advertising unless you shut off your television, your radio, and never go on YouTube. Politics stir up all kinds of feelings in us. People who are otherwise very even-keeled sometimes get very passionate and perhaps irrational when it comes to […]

Google Publishes 15 Favorite Street View Images

Google Maps turned 15 today. To celebrate, Paddy Flynn (Vice President of Geo Data Operations at Google), published Street View’s 15 Favorite Street Views. Notably, only one of the fifteen actually has a street in it! The rest are images of interesting places around the world and one is from space. My favorite of the […]

What’s the Difference Between a Caucus and a Primary

When I turned on the news this morning I was greeted with the news that the results of the Iowa caucuses would be delayed. That made me realize that I haven’t posted any resources that can be used to help students understand how a president is chosen in the United States. The first step in […]

How to Make Timelines With Google Sheets

There was a time when I didn’t like working with Google Sheets. That changed about ten years ago after a chat with Kern Kelley who showed me some of the things that he had created with Google Sheets. Since then I’ve used Google Sheets for all kinds of things from self-grading assessments to data visualizations. […]

Quickly Create Collaborative Maps With Ethermap

Google’s My Maps tool is great for students to use to collaborate on the creation of custom maps. The problem with it is that students must have Google accounts in order to use it. Ethermap solves that problem by not requiring users to have any kind of email account. Ethermap is a new tool that […]

FAQs About Teaching History With Technology 2020

For the new year I have updated my popular Practical Ed Tech course, Teaching History With Technology. The course begins next Wednesday. I announced the course about ten days ago and I’ve answered a handful of emails about it. Here are those questions and answers. 1. Will the sessions be recorded?  Yes. Every live webinar […]

Teaching History With Technology 2020

The primary means through which I’m able to keep this site running is through revenue from speaking engagements and sales of my Practical Ed Tech professional development courses like Teaching History With Technology. For 2020 I’ve updated the course to include new things like making your own history apps, creating green screen videos, and using […]

How to Find, View, and Download Thousands of Historical Maps

There are some good historical map collections available in Google Earth. But you can also import your own historical maps into Google Earth. topoView is a good place to find historical maps that you can import into Google Earth. topoView is a USGS website that provides historical maps dating back to 1880. You can download […]

Spend July in Washington DC as a C-SPAN Fellow

Every year C-SPAN hosts an educators’ conference and hosts a summer fellowship program. A friend of mine was selected for the conference a couple of years ago and he said it was an amazing experience! Both the fellowship program and the conference are held at C-SPAN’s headquarters in Washington D.C. C-SPAN’s Summer Fellowship program is […]

Dozens of Outline Maps You Can Print for Free

Even with tools like Google Earth and Google Map there is still a need for students to learn some basics of where things are in the world lest they think that Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon are near each other. To that end, a classic geography activity has kids labeling blank outline maps. You could […]

The History of Comic Art

The Library of Congress currently has an exhibit on display called Comic Art – 120 Years of Panels and Pages. The exhibit is both a physical exhibit and an online exhibit. Comic Art – 120 Years of Panels and Pages has five sections. Those sections are Early Years, Mid-Twentieth Century, Late Twentieth Century, Web Comics, […]

How to Create Interactive Images With Classtools

A couple of days ago I wrote about a new tool from Classtools called Image Annotator. It does exactly what it says on the tin. I made the following short video to demonstrate how easy it is to use the Classtools Image Annotator. In the video I demonstrate annotating an image of a map, but […]

Add Interactive Annotations to Images With a New Classtools Tool

Russel Tarr at Classtools has come up with another great little tool for teachers and students. The new Image Hotspot Generator on Classtools makes it easy to add interactive annotations to any picture that you upload to the site. The annotations that you add to your pictures can include text and links. Your annotated images […]

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 […]

Watch the Evolution of Campaign Commercials on The Living Room Candidate

I did a lot of driving and sitting in traffic in snowy conditions today  so I had a lot of time to listen to podcasts. The first that I listened to was Joe Rogan’s podcast with Tulsi Gabbard and Jocko Willink. The second was the Meat Eater Podcast with Steve Rinella. Both podcasts veered into […]

Three Ways to Collaboratively Create Multimedia Maps

With Padlet’s new multimedia mapping tool and the recent update to the web version of Google Earth there are more ways than ever for students to collaborate on creating multimedia maps. The three collaborative multimedia mapping tools that I’m going to recommend to most people for the foreseeable future are Google’s My Maps, Padlet, and […]

How to Create a Multimedia Map on Padlet

Last week I shared the news that Padlet now includes multimedia map creation options. Like all other Padlet layouts, the map option includes the capability to collaborate. The maps that you create on Padlet can have placemarkers that include pictures, videos, links, text, and audio files. You can even record audio and video within the […]

How to Create a Google Earth Tour – Updated Web Version

The web version of Google Earth has been available for more than two years now. Over those two years it has lagged behind the desktop version in terms of feature availability. That is starting to change now that Google has finally added the option to create tours in the web version of Google Earth. This […]

Collaboratively Create Maps on Padlet

Padlet has been in my list of top collaboration tools for nearly a decade. I started using it with my students back when it was still known as Wallwisher. There are many ways to use Padlet from simply providing a place to share text notes to using it as a place to collect video samples […]

How to Create a Multimedia Timeline Through Google Sheets

Timeline JS is one of my all-time favorite tools for use in history classes. It is always at the top of my list of tools for creating timelines. Timeline JS allows you to create a Google Sheet that then becomes a multimedia timeline. In your Google Sheet you can add links to pictures, maps, videos, […]

A Classic Geography Tool – Overlap Maps

As I mentioned on the latest episode of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast, last week I was reminded of a great little geography site called Overlap Maps. I hadn’t used it in a long time so I went to see if it was still functioning as it did when I was regularly using it seven […]

The Great Thanksgiving Listen is Back!

For the fifth year in a row StoryCorps is hosting The Great Thanksgiving Listen. This annual event is an effort to get families to talk and record their stories around the Thanksgiving table. The project was originally developed to get high school students to record the stories of their parents, grandparents, and other older family […]

Actively Learn – Find & Create Engaging Reading Assignments and More

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post that I wrote for a new supporter of FreeTech4Teachers.com.  A few years ago I stumbled upon Actively Learn while walking through the ISTE conference. I was immediately impressed by what they were developing. At that time it was just getting started as a new platform through which teachers can […]

A Couple of Fun and Simple Map Games for Students of All Ages

Ian Fisher is a software engineer at Google. In addition to his work at Google he’s developed a couple of fun map games. The games are How Many European Cities Can You Name? and How Many US Cities Can You Name? Both of the games are played the same way. Simply open the game map […]

How to Find and Create Primary Source Lessons With DocsTeach

DocsTeach has been one of my go-to tools for social studies teachers for many years. Despite that recommendation I’ve never made a video on how it works, until now. DocsTeach is a free service offered by the National Archives through which you can find primary source lesson activities and create your own activities by using […]

My Top Twelve Tools for Social Studies Teachers and Students

Last week I published a list of my top five Google tools for social studies teachers and my top five non-Google tools for social studies teachers. If you missed either of those lists or you want all of them in one place, I’ve put together the following combined list and added two more items to […]

My Top 5 Tools for Social Studies Teachers and Students (Non-Google Edition)

Earlier this week I published my top five Google tools for social studies teachers and students. Recognizing that not everyone wants to use or has access to G Suite for Education accounts, here are my top five non-Google tools for social studies teachers and students. I didn’t include my all-time favorite timeline tool, Timeline JS […]

My Top 5 Google Tools for Social Studies Teachers and Students

As longtime readers of this blog know, my background is largely in social studies with a smattering of special education and corporate training thrown in for good measure. It’s teaching social studies that will always be my first professional love. That’s why I always get excited when readers send me questions like the one I […]

50 Years of Migration Waves

This morning while reading a National Geographic article about animal migrations in national parks I stumbled onto a related feature titled Migration Waves. Migration Waves is a series of graphs depicted the movement of humans between countries between the years 1967 and 2017. The graphs on Migration Waves are grouped according to four factors that […]

StudentCam 2020 – Student Documentary Contest

Every year C-SPAN hosts the StudentCam video contest for middle school and high school students in the United States. This annual event invites students to produce short videos about current issues related to United States government and politics. This year’s C-SPAN StudentCam contest asks students to produce a 4-6 minute video about the issue they […]

DocsTeach Adds New Documents and Lessons About Suffrage

Earlier this week the Library of Congress launched a new crowdsourcing campaign to transcribe more than 20,000 primary source documents related to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. The LOC isn’t the only organization to make primary sources related to suffrage available online. DocsTeach, produced by the National Archives, has a Women’s Rights […]

A New Crowdsourcing Project from the Library of Congress

Last year the Library of Congress introduced a new online project called Crowd. The project invites teachers, students, and anyone interested in history to contribute to the transcription of primary source documents. The documents are arranged in thematic collections that the LOC calls “campaigns.” This week the Library of Congress added a new campaign to […]

Lewis & Clark in Google Earth – And Lesson Plans for K-12

This morning while browsing through Google Earth looking for a resource about sharks for Shark Week (I found it) I came across a Google Earth voyage about Lewis and Clark. The Google Earth voyage titled Explorers: Lewis and Clark contains twelve multimedia placemarkers documenting the outbound and return journey of the Lewis and Clark expedition. […]

Three More Recommended Resources for Teaching Civics and Government

Earlier this week I published a blog post in which I shared the resources that I shared with a reader who had emailed me seeking my recommended resources for teaching civics and government. I made that list completely from memory. This afternoon I dug into my archives to find a few more recommended resources for […]

Three Recommended Resources for Teaching Civics and Government

Yesterday I received an email from a reader who was looking for my recommendation for a few resources for teaching a government or civics course. The following are the recommendations that I made. iCivics is an excellent source of educational games related to various topics in civics and government. iCivics has steadily grown over the years […]

Crowdsourcing Civil War Document Transcription

Last fall the Library of Congress launched a new online initiative called Crowd. As the name implies, it’s a crowdsourcing project that anyone who registers on the LOC Crowd site can participate in. All of the documents in the Crowd project are documents in the LOC’s collection that need to be transcribed. The latest collection […]

Canva Adds New Trifold Design Templates

Canva has been my go-to graphic design tool for the last half decade. It’s a tool that’s easy to use and makes those of us who don’t have an eye for design look like we do have a bit of a clue. I often the use Canva’s blog post graphics, Twitter graphics, and YouTube cover […]

A Chrome Extension That Shows You the Value of Your Time

Time Is Money is a free Chrome extension that can help students see what the expression “time is money” means. Time Is Money will display the number of hours a person would have to work in order to have enough money to purchase any product that has a price listed on a shopping site. For example, I went […]

Zip Tapestry – Demographic Data and More, Mapped

Zip Lookup is an interesting use of the ESRI mapping platform. The map allows you to enter any US zip code to discover demographic data about that area. Whenever I see something like this I am skeptical of how well it will work for very small towns like the one that I live in (South Paris, […]

Mapping Books

Yesterday I published a post about creating multimedia timelines as an alternative form of a book report. Later in the day I was walked past the little book store next to my favorite coffee shop and saw a copy of Louise Dickinson Rich’s book, We Took to the Woods. This is a classic in the […]

Lee’s Map of Gettysburg – And Tools for Making It Interactive

Today’s featured document featured by the National Archives is a copy of General Robert E. Lee’s map of the Battle of Gettysburg. If you download a copy of the map (which you can do as it is in the public domain) and then zoom-in on it, you will be able to see the notations about […]

Quillionz – Get Quiz Questions Automatically Generated From Documents

Quillionz is a new supporter of FreeTech4Teachers.com Quillionz is a new service that makes it super easy to have a set of reading comprehension questions and quiz questions generated from a passage of text. There is a free version and pro (paid) version of Quillionz. This post is about the capabilities of the free version. […]

A Great Guide to Capturing Oral Biographies

A few years ago I hosted a workshop on recording history with students (slides from that workshop can be seen here). The purpose of the workshop was to help teachers help their students record interviews with elders in their communities. The workshop was loosely based on a project that I did with my own students […]

Teaching With Historical Newspapers – An LOC Webinar Recording

There are two sites that often refer people to when I’m asked about locating copies of old newspapers. The first is the Google Newspaper Archive. The second is the Chronicling America collection from the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America collection contains more than 2,600 digitized copies of newspapers printed in the United States between […]

How to Measure Distances in Google Maps

A couple of weeks ago in the Practical Ed Tech newsletter I featured ten ways to use Google Earth in your classroom for more than just social studies lessons. Many of the ideas in that list can also be applied to the web browser version Google Maps. A good example of that is found in […]

How to Find Games & Quizzes in Google Earth

This week Google added a new round of Where in Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? The new game follows up on the popularity of the first Where in Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? that was launched in March. The new game has players help Carmen Sandiego find Tutankhamun’s Mask. That’s not the only game that […]

Ten Great Tech Tools for Social Studies Lessons

Over the last decade I’ve written about a lot of excellent resources for social studies lessons. Over time some of those tools have faded away and others have moved to the forefront of my top recommendations. Here’s my current list of ten top tools for social studies lessons. Timeline JS Timeline projects as as old […]

How the Stock Market Works

Playing a stock market simulation game is one of the popular ways to teach the basic concepts of stock markets. I played one when I was in fifth grade and decades later teachers still use the same concept. In fact, I did a stock market simulation game with my own high school students. Before jumping […]

8 Options for Making Digital Maps

In yesterday’s post about English Heritage’s Map of Myth, Legend, and Folklore I included a mention of using StoryMap JS to create interactive maps. That prompted a response from Cindy Rudy who suggested the idea of using Thinglink or Google Earth to make similar maps of myths, legends, and folklore. That was my inspiration for this […]

5 Google Earth Pro Tips for Teachers and Students

Google Earth is currently available in a few different versions. There is the web browser version that was built for use in Chrome and Chromebooks. There is an iOS version and an Android version for use on tablets and phones. And then there is the original version made for use as desktop software on Windows, […]

5 Tips for New Google Expeditions Users

Image copyright: Richard Byrne Google Expeditions is often the first educational virtual reality tool that I introduce to teachers who come to one of my workshops. Here are five tips that I frequently pass along to teachers who are preparing to use Google Expeditions for the first time. If you have never used Expeditions, you […]

AP Government Review Resources – Kahoots and Quizlets from C-SPAN Classroom

AP exam season will be here soon. As they have done for the last five years, C-SPAN Classroom will be hosting a live Cram for the Exam session on May 4th. It’s free and open to any student who is taking the AP Government exam. That’s not the only AP Government review resource that C-SPAN […]

How to Measure Distances & Share Google Earth Views

Thanks to YouTube’s “on this day” feature last night I was reminded that two years ago I published a video overview of what was then the new browser-based version of Google Earth. As I shared on my YouTube channel last night, Google has added a couple of features to Google Earth since I published my […]

Google Earth and Maps Lessons for Five Subject Areas

Google Earth and Google Maps are two of my favorite educational technology tools that often are seen as only being useful for geography or history lessons. While they are good for lessons in those subjects, Google Earth and Google Maps can be used for lessons in other subject areas. Here are some ideas and resources […]

Langscape – An Interactive Map of Languages

Langscape is an interactive map created at the Maryland Language Science Center. The Langscape interactive map displays more than 6,000 markers representing more than 6,000 languages. Each marker represents the native language of that location. Zoom-in and click on a marker to learn more about the language. When you click on the marker you will […]

Make Trading Cards for Historical and Fictional Characters

Read Write Think Trading Cards is a free tool that students can use to create trading cards about people, places, and events both real and fictional. You can use it in your web browser, as an Android app, or as an iOS app. In this video I demonstrate how to use Read Write Think Trading Cards in […]

Interactive Map – The Battle of Gettysburg

Decisive Moments at the Battle of Gettysburg is an interactive map hosted on Smithsonian.com. The map details events of the battle and the decisions made by commanding officers on both sides of the war. You can navigate the map by using the timeline on the left-hand side of the map or by clicking the placemarks on […]

Where On Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? – A Great Geography Game

The theme song for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is an earworm for those of us who grew up in the 80’s or early 90’s. And thanks to Google’s new partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, we can now share the fun of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? with our kids. This […]

More Than 3500 Free Civics Lessons

60 Second Civics has long been one of my go-to resources for lessons on U.S. civics and government. 60 Second Civics is a daily podcast produced by the Center for Civic Education. Each 60 Second Civics episode offers a short lesson about US Civics. Along with each episode is a one question quiz about that day’s […]

Five Good Places to Find Current Events Stories for Kids

For a couple of years I taught an elective that was all about current events. That was one of my favorite social studies teaching assignments because I enjoy listening to what students have to save about the news. CNN Student News was one of my go-to resources when I was teaching that current events course. […]

What’s the Difference Between England, Great Britain, and United Kingdom?

Since I’ve just returned from a trip to London, I figure it’s a good time to revisit one of my favorite geography videos. That video is The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained. The video explains name refers to, the differences between the three, and why some people incorrectly use them […]

Students Can Create Their Own Tours to Share in Google Expeditions

Googles’ Tour Creator launched last spring and since then has become one of my favorite tools for history and geography classes. One of my few complaints about it was that while students could easily build virtual reality tours, it wasn’t always easy to share those tours with their teachers and classmates. That is about to […]

Remove Image Backgrounds With PhotoScissors

PhotoScissors is a free image editing tool that you can use to remove the background from your images. PhotoScissors is available to use for free online and is available to download as desktop software. To use PhotoScissors online simply go to the site and upload a picture that you want to edit. After you have […]

5 Good Tools for Creating Timelines

The video I posted earlier this week that demonstrated how to use Canva to create timelines sparked a couple of reader emails about other options for making timelines. Specifically, one reader was looking for tools that would support video playback and one was looking for a tool that didn’t require students to have email accounts. […]

Picture Yourself in Front of Any Landmark With Remove.BG and Google Slides

Last weekend I published a video about Remove.bg and it has certainly been a hit with many readers. I’ve received a lot of comments and questions about it in my email, Facebook pages, and on Twitter. This morning a reader named Marni sent me a question that was typical of what I’ve been seeing this […]

DuckDuckGo + Apple Maps = Private Map Searches

DuckDuckGo, the search engine that claims to not track your searches, has announced an integration with Apple Maps. According to the announcement this integration will let you search for places without DuckDuckGo or Apple Maps keeping a record of those searches. But in order to get directions from point A to point B you will […]

How to Use Canva to Create a Timeline

Canva is one of those great tools that the more time you spend with it the more cool features you discover in it. One of those features is the ability to create timelines to save as images and PDFs. Canva has about a dozen timeline templates that you can modify by altering the text size […]

More Free Webinars from the Council for Economic Education

The Council for Economic Education has recently published their  schedule of free professional development webinars that they are hosting in the first five months of 2019. The series begins next week on January 15th and runs weekly (mostly) through May 28th. All of the webinars are scheduled for 7pm Eastern Time. You can register for one […]

Introduction to Using Google Expeditions in Your Classroom

Google Expeditions is one of my favorite virtual reality apps for students and teachers. The app provides hundreds of virtual reality experiences for students. There are VR experiences that can be used in social studies, science, and art classes. The guide mode in Expeditions is fantastic for pacing activities inside of the app. Rather than […]

Federal Land vs. State Land

As I write this What is Federal Land? is the #49 trending video on YouTube. It’s nice to see an educational video trending that high on YouTube. The video was produced by CGP Grey who has produced some other fantastic educational videos over the years. Through What is Federal Land? viewers can learn how land in […]

Teaching the Constitution With Political Cartoons – Webinar Recording

DocsTeach is one of my favorite tools for building history lessons centered around primary source documents, pictures, maps, and drawings. DocsTeach contains an integrated search tool for finding artifacts from the U.S. National Archives. You can use that search tool to find political cartoons. That was focus of a recent professional development webinar that was […]

800+ Persuasive Maps – And a Tool for Making Your Own

About a week ago Open Culture published an article about Cornell University’s Persuasive Cartography collection. I hadn’t seen that collection before so I went down a rabbit hole looking at map after map for a good 45 minutes. Persuasive maps aren’t maps that you would use to teach a classic geography lesson. That’s because persuasive […]

17 Lessons in Teaching History With Technology

This coming Monday evening (7pm ET) I am hosting Teaching History With Technology on PracticalEdTech.com. This course meets five times (once per week). There are seventeen concepts that are covered in the course. Each concept can be applied to the creation of technology-infused history lessons. The concepts covered in the course are listed below. Using […]

Three Tools for Creating Custom Maps Without a Google Account

Google’s My Maps is a great tool for designing custom maps. The problem with it is that students can only save their work if they have Google accounts. If your school uses G Suite for Education that’s probably not a problem, but it is a problem for students who don’t have G Suite accounts. If […]

Mapping the Ingredients in Thanksgiving Meals

Last year on Thanksgiving I discovered an ESRI Storymap titled Where Does Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From? Of course, having discovered it on Thanksgiving Day it was a bit too late to be useful so I’m sharing it again this year in advance of Thanksgiving. Where Does Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From? displays where eight […]

A Handful of Resources for Learning About Veterans Day

This Sunday is Veterans Day (many places will observe it on Monday). The following resources can help students understand the origins and meaning of Veterans Day including how it is different from Memorial Day. Bet You Didn’t Know: Veterans Day. The video explains the origins of the holiday and why its date of celebration has […]

Knoema – Huge Collections of Data Maps and Charts

Knoema is a service that offers a huge collection of data sets and maps for public use. Knoema offers data maps and charts for almost every country in the world. There are dozens of data categories to pick from. Some of the data categories that you will find include GPD Per Capita, Government Debt, Migration, Housing, […]

Two Online Primary Source Document Activities for High School Students

Earlier this week the Library of Congress launched a new crowdsourcing project called Crowd. The project seeks volunteers to transcribe primary source documents that are available online through the Library of Congress. Crowd is similar to the Smithsonian’s Digital Volunteers program. Both programs provide an opportunity for high school students and some middle school students […]

LOC Crowd – Crowdsourcing the Transcription of Primary Sources

The Library of Congress has launched a new crowdsourcing initiative to transcribe primary source documents. The new initiative simply called Crowd has contains collections of documents that the Library of Congress wants the public to help transcribe. Anyone can participate in the LOC’s Crowd project. To get started simply go to the site and click […]

GeoGreeting – Send Messages Using Google Earth Imagery

Years ago I wrote about a service called GeoGreeting. This morning I got an email that reminded me of the service so I decided to see if it still works. Sure enough GeoGreeting still works as well as ever. It’s a free service that spells out your greetings using satellite images of buildings found in […]

Let’s Talk Politics – An Alexa Game for Learning About U.S. Civics

Let’s Talk Politics is a new Alexa app designed for reviewing and learning about U.S. government. Let’s Talk Politics is an interactive game in which Alexa asks you questions about the U.S. political system and you speak your answers. The app provides explanations of the correct answers after you reply to each question. Unlike typical […]

ClassTools SMS Generator – Text Messages Between Historical Figures

Last week I wrote about three ways that students can create social media profiles for historical and literary characters. Writing that post reminded me of the Classtools Fake SMS Generator. You could have students use the Classtools SMS Generator to create simple conversations between historical characters as way to get them to think about those […]

A New LOC Online Collection – Theodore Roosevelt’s Papers

I have always found Theodore Roosevelt to be one of the most fascinating characters in U.S. History. That is why I was excited this morning when I saw an email from the Library of Congress announcing the online publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers. The LOC’s collection of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers is divided into sixteen sections. […]

Case Maker – Civics Lessons Built on Primary Sources

Case Maker is a free service designed for middle school social studies teachers and their students. Case Maker uses primary sources from the Library of Congress as the basis of activities in which students have to build a case in response to real civics scenarios. For example, the first cast that I tried was about […]

How to Import Files Into Google Earth

In my previous post I shared the steps that I took to find a Google Earth file that contains more than 550 ancient locations in ancient Greece. At the end of the video in that post I demonstrated how I was able to display those locations in Google Earth. That method can be used for […]

How I Found a Google Earth File of 550+ Ancient Greek Places

Last night on Twitter Wes Fryer asked me if I knew of any Google Earth files that displayed ancient Greek locations. I didn’t have anything within my own bookmarks so I did a quick Google search that I filtered according to file type. I first filtered by file type .KMZ but that didn’t get me […]

60 Second Adventures in Religion – Animated Explanations

Some days I scroll through Feedly or Facebook and come across things that immediately make me think of a current or former colleague. That is exactly what happened when I saw the Open University’s 60 Second Adventures in Religion videos. I’m quite sure that my former colleague Bree will be interested in using these videos as […]

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in Canada. As an American I was relatively ignorant of this holiday until about six years ago. If you’re an American or your just generally curious about the differences and similarities between American and Canadian Thanksgiving, watch the following videos. Both of the following humorous videos that explain the differences between Thanksgiving […]

A Fun and Free State & Country Capital Identification Game

Capital Toss is a free geography game from ABCya. The game has a state capitals mode and a country capitals mode. In both modes of the game works the same way. The name of a state or country appears at the bottom of the screen and three rows of capital names scroll across the top. When […]

The LOC Launches the National Screening Room Online

The Library of Congress has a new online collection called the National Screening Room. The National Screening Room currently contains 287 videos. The videos are digital copies of films made in the 19th and 20th centuries. You can browse the collection by date, location of the filming, and subject. You can also search for videos […]

Lessons in Teaching History With Technology

Next week I am hosting my Teaching History With Technology course on PracticalEdTech.com. That five week course covers seventeen concepts for infusing technology into social studies lessons. Those core concepts are outlined below. Using technology to help students analyze historical/ primary source documents. Making artifacts interactive. Hosting online history discussions The importance of structure and […]

8 Tools for Making Multimedia Timelines

Creating timelines has been a go-to activity for history teachers since the beginning of history. When I made timelines as a student and in my first year or two of teaching, timelines were made on paper. Today, there are better ways to have students create timelines. In fact, in Teaching History With Technology I feature a couple […]

How to Make a Timeline Through Google Sheets

Earlier this week I wrote about Flippity’s new timeline creation template for use in Google Sheets. The template lets you create a multimedia timeline by simply entering information into a spreadsheet and then publishing it to the web. There are a couple of quirks to using the template that should be noted before you have […]

Video Resources for Constitution Day

Constitution Day in the United States is on this coming Monday. By law all schools receiving federal funds have to offer some type of instruction about the Constitution. Yesterday, I shared a couple of interactive resources that can help students learn about the U.S. Constitution. Here are a couple of video resources for teaching and […]

What is Mystery Skype?

Last week I reTweeted someone’s request to find a partner for a Mystery Skype activity. That generated some new connections, but it also generated a few questions from people who wanted to know what Mystery Skype is and what it entails. What is Mystery Skype? Mystery Skype is an activity in which you connect your […]

The Online Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States

The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond hosts the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States. This online atlas contains more than 700 historical maps of the United States. The maps within the atlas are arranged into eighteen sections. As a student and teacher of history I was drawn to the sections […]

5 Multimedia Projects for Social Studies Classes

If you teach social studies and you’re looking for a new project to engage your students this year, I have some suggestions for you. All of the following ideas can be modified for use in elementary school, middle school, or high school settings. Create Virtual Tours Services like Google Expeditions are great for locating virtual […]

Chronicling America – An Archive of 2,600+ Digitized Newspapers

Chronicling America is a great resource provided by the Library of Congress. On Chronicling America you can find more than 2,600 digitized copies of newspapers printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword. All of the […]

Three Short Lessons About the Origins of Labor Day

This weekend, Labor Day weekend, is the unofficial end of summer. After this weekend nearly all students and teachers will be back in school. If you’re already back in school, you and your students are probably looking forward to the three day weekend. Before you start the three day weekend, take a few minutes to […]

New Artifact Collections Added to DocsTeach

DocsTeach is one of my go-to recommendations for anyone who teaches U.S. History at a middle school or high school level. The site offers a dozen tools that you can use to create interactive history lessons based on primary and secondary sources. To help you build those lessons DocsTeach provides thousands of primary and secondary […]

60 Second Adventures in Economics

The Open University hosts a series of six short videos intended to introduce viewers to some of the basic concepts of macroeconomics. In 60 Second Adventures in Economics you will find short videos explaining things like the Paradox of Thrift and Comparative Advantage. The video about comparative advantage is embedded below. Applications for Education 60 Second Adventures […]

A Free Presidential Timeline Poster for Your Classroom

For the last few years C-SPAN Classroom has offered a free poster depicting a timeline of American presidents. That offer is back for the 2018-19 school year. The poster shows each President’s time in office, a short biography, the era of American history in which each President served, and a couple of major events that […]

More Than 5,000 Historical Maps for Teachers and Students

Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse has a collection of more than 5,000 historical maps. The maps are licensed for free download and reuse by teachers and students. The collection is organized by continent and country. The US category is further broken down and organized by state and by historical theme. Some of the maps in this collection are […]

Practical Ed Tech Webinar – Google Earth, Maps, and VR in Your Classroom

Next Tuesday I’m hosting a Practical Ed Tech webinar titled Google Earth, Maps, and VR Tours. The webinar will introduce you to how to use these powerful tools in your classroom. While social studies is the obvious fit for these tools, they can be used in many other subject areas. In the webinar you will […]

How to Share Specific Google Earth Views in Google Classroom

The development of the browser-based version made Google Earth accessible to students who use Chromebooks as their primary classroom computers. One way that I like to use Google Earth is to create sets of inquiry questions based upon a specific location and or a specific view of a place. You can tell students the location […]

Photo Roulette – A Library of Congress Game

Photo Roulette is a fun little game from Library of Congress. The game shows you a randomly selected pictures from the LOC’s digital collections and you have to guess the year in which the picture was taken. You have ten guesses before you’re out of luck. After the submission of each guess you’re given a […]

What is a Storyboard? – History and Use Cases

Over the years I’ve written many blog posts about using storyboards in a variety of classroom settings. I’ve even hosted webinars on the topic. But until today I never wondered about the origins of storyboards. That changed when I read Aaron Sherman’s What is a Storyboard? In What is a Storyboard? Aaron Sherman, founder of […]

How to Measure Distances in Google Earth

The addition of a measurement tool in the Chrome (browser) and Android versions of Google Earth was one of the many things that Google announced yesterday. I’m not sure what took them so long to add this because it was always a feature in the desktop version of Google Earth. In the following video I […]

10 Good Templates for Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts Lessons

Earlier this week I published a post about Read Write Think’s theme poem online activity. Obviously, that activity is a great fit for a language arts lesson. RWT is known for language arts interactive activities and templates. Dig a little deeper into RWT and you’ll find interactive activities, apps, and templates that can be used […]

A Timeline JS Timeline of Wall Street

Timeline JS is one of my favorite tools for social studies teachers and students. It’s one of six excellent storytelling tools produced by Knight Lab at Northwestern University. Timeline JS lets anyone create a multimedia timeline by entering data into a Google Sheets template. It’s used by teachers, by students, and by media companies like […]

Discover Primary Sources by Browsing the World Digital Library Maps

The World Digital Library hosts more than 19,000 primary documents and images from dozens of libraries around the world. Hosted by the Library of Congress and sponsored in part by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the mission of the World Digital Library is to promote the study and understanding of cultures. The WDL can be searched by date, […]

Where Is That Summer Paycheck Going? – A Lesson for High School Students

Summer is near and for many high school students that means it’s time to start working at summer jobs. For many students the first real paycheck that they receive comes with a surprise in the form of tax withholding. PBS Learning Media has a free lesson plan through which students learn about reasons for taxes […]

Nine Fun and Challenging Geography Games

Yesterday, I shared the City-Guesser geography game. That game was just the latest in a long list of online geography games that I have tried over the years. Many have come and gone over the years but the following are still going strong. GameOn World is a multiplayer geography game developed by a high school teacher […]

City Guesser – A Challenging Map Game

City-Guesser is a challenging map-based game. The game shows you a section of a map centered over a city. The labels are removed from the map so you have to guess the city’s name based on other clues like bodies of water and orientation. City-Guesser gives you four answer choices to choose from. If you […]

A Few Good Videos for Learning About Memorial Day

Memorial Day in the United States is ten days away. Many students associate the day with with barbecues, parades, and a day off from school. But that’s not what Memorial Day is about. As we know it’s a day to honor those who died in service to our country. Some students may confuse the day […]

Map-based Stories from National Geographic

GeoStories are short, map-based stories featured on National Geographic Education. The stories combine text, maps, and pictures to tell a story as a series of slides connected to placemarks on maps. National Geographic Education currently offers twenty-three GeoStories. The current GeoStories cover subjects in the areas of politics, ecology, music, and exploration. Applications for Education Even […]

Great Journeys and Explorations – Stories Told With Interactive Maps and Timelines

Ever since I was an elementary school student I have loved reading about great journeys and explorations like those of Lewis and Clark, James Cook, and Robert Peary. As an adult I still love those stories and recently started reading The River of Doubt for a second time. Picking up that book reminded me of […]

A Google Maps and Earth Activity for Art Classes

When I conduct workshops on Google Maps and Google Earth I always point out that the uses for those tools extend beyond the realm of geography and history. One example of using Google Maps and Earth outside of the typical geography setting is using Google Maps and Earth to have students place art and artists on an interactive […]

Video Guides to Common Fallacies

The Guide to Common Fallacies is a resource that I wish I had back when I was teaching ninth grade students to recognize bias, propaganda, and logical fallacies. The Guide to Common Fallacies is a series of nine short videos from the PBS Idea Channel. Each video covers a different common fallacy. Some of the fallacies explained in […]

How to Use Google’s New VR Tour Creator

A few hours ago Google announced the launch of their new VR Tour Creator. This free tool lets everyone create their own virtual tours to view in Google Cardboard and or in the Chrome web browser. Tours are created by selecting locations in Google Maps and then selecting 360 degree Street View imagery. There’s also […]

History and Literature Text Messages

ClassTools.net is one of my favorite places to find templates for online activities for middle school and high school students. One of the templates on ClassTools.net that I’ve recommended for years is the Fake SMS Generator. Watch my following video to learn how to use the SMS Generator on ClassTools. Applications for Education You could […]

Headlines and Heroes – A New Resource from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress offers many excellent online resources for teachers and students. Even just following the LOC’s Twitter account will provide you with fun history facts. In fact, it was through that Twitter account that I learned about a new Library of Congress blog called Headline and Heroes: Newspaper, Comics & More Fine Print. […]

Sourcera for Google Slides – Historical Images to Use In Your Slides

Sourcera is an Add-on for Google Slides that lets you search for historical images and insert them directly into your slides. Sourcera pulls images from eleven sources including Flickr’s Commons, the British Library, and the Digital Public Library of America. To find an image through Sourcera you need to highlight a word on a slide […]

Docs Teach Adds New Primary Sources About WWI

Docs Teach is a fantastic resource for US History teachers that I have shared many times over the years. I like it so much that I include it in my Teaching History With Technology course.  Docs Teach provides teachers with access tools for creating online lessons based on collections of primary source documents. Docs Teach […]

The Economics of Seinfeld – Lessons Based on Seinfeld Clips

The Economics of Seinfeld is a neat concept for teaching economics lessons developed by economics professors from Eastern Illinois University and Baker University. The Economics of Seinfeld is a catalog of clips (sometimes entire episodes) from the hit sitcom Seinfeld that demonstrate various economics concepts. There are seven pages of clips that you can browse through. Alternatively, and more practically, […]

WikiWhere – A Challenging Map Game

WikiWhere is a neat map-based trivia game. The goal of the game is to identify cities based on their descriptions. The descriptions come from Wikipedia entries. You can get up to three clues before you have to answer by clicking on the map to identify the city that you think is described by the excerpts. […]

New Scenes and Characters Added to Storyboard That

Storyboard That has been one of my favorite digital storytelling tools since I first tried it many years ago. Many readers of this blog have come to love it too. Three of the things that make Storyboard That popular are its ease of use, the free lesson plans, and a commitment to continuous development. That […]

Open Explorer – Follow Along on National Geographic Expeditions

Open Explorer is a new offering from National Geographic that is designed to let anyone follow along on exploration expeditions around the world. When you visit the site you will see a big “get started” button on the homepage. Scroll down past that to see an interactive map representing the locations of more than 400 […]

Find the Features of Digital Vaults in DocsTeach

The U.S. National Archives used to have a great feature called the National Archives Digital Vaults. The Digital Vaults site offered great tools for teaching with primary sources from the National Archives. One of the aspects that I particularly liked was called “pathways challenges” which allowed students to see the connections between events and primary […]

By Request – Life on Minimum Wage Simulation

Last week I received a handful of requests for the Google Docs version of my Life on Minimum Wage economics game. While I no longer grant print or edit access to my public Google Docs, I do make PDFs of my documents available to download through Box.com. The purpose of Life on Minimum Wage is […]

National Geographic Publishes Fun Facts About All National Parks

As the weather warms in North America more visitors arrive in the 59 U.S. National Parks. Acadia National Park here in Maine is crowded in the summer so come visit in the winter to see another side of the first national park created from land donated to the federal government. That fun fact is one […]

5 Good Resources for Teaching and Learning About the American Revolution

This coming Monday is Patriots’ Day. It is an official state holiday here in Maine, in Massachusetts, and in Wisconsin. The day commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord. As a New Englander this is a good day to review some good resources for teaching and learning about the American Revolution. History Animated has an […]

JuxtaposeJS – Create Side-by-Side Comparison Frames

JuxtaposeJS is a free tool for making and hosting side-by-side comparisons of images. The tool was designed to help people see before and after views of a location, a building, a person, or anything else that changes appearance over time. JuxtaposeJS will let you put the images into a slider frame that you can embed […]

An Animated Map of the Rise and Fall of Communism

The Spread of Communism is an animated map that shows the rise and fall of communism from 1917 through 2017. When you visit the map you can press the play button in the lower, right corner to play the animation. When it plays the animation highlights each country according to the year in which a […]

Echoes of the Great War – Online WWI Exhibition

Echoes of the Great War is a fantastic collection of videos, audio recordings, and pictures about WWI. This online exhibition created by the Library of Congress. Echoes of the Great War is arranged thematically. Those four themes are Arguing Over War, Over Here, Over There, and World Overturned. Within each of those themes you will […]

7 Options for Creating Timelines Online – An Updated Comparison Chart

Making timelines is a go-to activity for many social studies teachers. When I made timelines as a student and in my first year or two of teaching, timelines were made on paper. Today, there are better ways to have students create timelines. In fact, in Teaching History With Technology I feature a couple of my […]

Three Tools for Combining Maps With Timelines

Creating timelines whose events are directly connected to a map display is a good way for students to see correlations between locations and events. Here are three tools that students can use to create mapped timeline stories. StoryMap JS comes from the same people that offer Timeline JS. On StoryMap JS you can create mapped stories. […]

ChronoZoom is Closing Soon

ChronoZoom, a good tool for creating multilayer timelines, is shutting down on March 15th. Roland Saekow, ChronoZoom’s co-founder, announced the closure through an email sent to ChronoZoom users. In the email Seakow announced that public projects will be archived and made available for download. Directions for making your projects public can be found in this […]

Two Simple Timeline Creation Tools That Are Frequently Overlooked

This morning I answered an email from a reader who was looking for a suggestion for a timeline creation tool. My recommendation was to try Timeline JS which is my favorite tool and is featured in my Teaching History With Technology course. But there are many other ways to create timelines. Two of those ways […]

Youngzine – Great Current Events Resource

Youngzine is an excellent resource for anyone who needs ideas for current events lessons in an elementary school or middle school classroom. Youngzine articles feature a mix of news, sports, and entertainment stories for elementary school students. A new edition is published weekly. Most articles on Youngzine are accompanied by a supporting video. Articles that reference […]

Newspaper Templates for Google Docs & Word

This morning I answered an email from a reader who was looking for suggestions on tools that his students can use to collaboratively create a newspaper. My first suggestion was to try LucidPress. My second thought was to try using some Google Docs templates. I didn’t have any Google Docs templates of my own so […]

The History of the State of the Union Address

Tonight, President Trump delivered the State of the Union Address. This post is not about what he said or didn’t say tonight. Instead, it is intended to share some resources that could help you teach your students about the history of the State of the Union Address. The following two videos from CNN and Fox […]

Patches – Create Your Own Virtual Reality Environments

In the past I’ve featured Google’s Cardboard Camera and Street View apps as tools for creating simple virtual reality imagery. Those tools are great if you want to capture immersive images of physical environments and share those images with others. But if you want to create completely drawn and animated virtual reality scenes, then you’ll […]

An Updated Version of Google Earth Released

Thanks to the Google Earth Blog I just learned about the release of an updated version of Google Earth Pro. Google Earth Pro (it’s free despite the “pro” designation) is the desktop version or “classic” version of Google Earth. The latest version includes thirteen improvements to Google Earth Pro. You can see the full list […]

Math, Social Studies, and Diagrams – The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where a cold bug has hit our house. I tried to fight it, but this morning I have to admit that I’ve caught it too. This might put me a little behind on my plan to have Practical Ed Tech completely remodeled by kick-off off the Patriots’ game on Sunday afternoon. […]

Midterm Elections – 5 Things You Should Know

2018 is a midterm election year in the United States. What’s that mean? In short, it is the Congressional elections that happen in the middle of a president’s term in office. But to find out what midterm elections really mean, students should watch 5 Things You Should Know About Midterm Elections. In this video produced […]

Eight Lessons in Teaching History With Technology

A couple of month ago I launched an on-demand version of my popular Teaching History With Technology course. So far more than 50 people have completed the course. The question that almost everyone asks before they enroll in the course is, “what’s covered in the course?” That’s a fair question to ask so I published […]

One Day Left to Save 30% on Two Practical Ed Tech Courses

Providing online professional development courses is one of the ways that I am able to fund Free Technology for Teachers. I offer those courses through my Practical Ed Tech website. All month long I’ve offered a 30% discount on two on-demand courses. Those discounts will expire tomorrow night at midnight (Eastern Time). Teaching History With […]

A Fun Geography Game for All – Best of 2017

As I do during this week every year, I am taking some time off to relax and prepare for the new year. Every day this week I will be featuring the most popular blog posts of the year. This was one of the most popular posts in September. Earlier this week Maps Mania published a […]

10 Ways to Use Google Earth in Your Classroom – Best of 2017

As I do during this week every year, I am taking some time off to relax and prepare for the new year. Every day this week I will be featuring the most popular blog posts of the year. This one of the most popular posts in May. A couple of weeks ago Google released the […]

Social Studies Teachers, This Is For You!

Back in November I released my popular Teaching History With Technology course in an on-demand format. It has proven to be a popular format as more people have participated in the on-demand course in December than in all of the combined live versions of the course offered earlier in the year. If you would like […]

Three Sites That Help Students Compare the Size of Countries and States

Over the weekend Open Culture featured one of my favorite websites to use in geography classes. That website is called The True Size Of… and it lets you quickly compare the size of two countries or two states within the United States. To compare two countries simply enter one into the search box then enter a […]

A Multimedia Timeline of WWII in Europe

Last week I shared National Geographic’s excellent multimedia timeline of the Pacific Theater of WWII. National Geographic offers a similar timeline of the European Theater. While the title of the timeline is World War II in Europe, it does include include events that happened in Africa and some events in the United States. The timeline […]

Smithsonian Learning Lab Announces Most Popular Resources of 2017

The Smithsonian Learning Lab is a great tool for organizing collections of resources available through the Smithsonian. Through the Learning Lab you can search for and then gather together documents, images, videos, interactive animations, and lesson plans. This playlist of videos will show you everything that you need to know in order to use the […]

Free Wall Maps for Your Classroom

Like good manners and flannel shirts, wall maps never go out of style. If you need some new maps to put on the walls of your classroom, take a look at the free maps that National Geographic offers. Nat Geo Map Maker kits provide teachers with files for printing wall maps, table top maps, and […]

Apply for a C-SPAN Fellowship

Next summer might feel like it is a long way away, but it’s not too early to start thinking about how you’ll spend your next summer break. Social Studies teachers in the United States might want to consider spending part of the 2018 summer as a C-SPAN fellow in Washington, D.C. The C-SPAN Teacher Fellowship […]

Three Puzzle Templates That Help Students See Content Connections

Russel Tarr publishes a lot of great educational games and instructional templates on ClassTools.net. Among those templates are three activities designed to help students see the connections between events, people, places, and ideas within a subject. The Class Tools Hexagons Generator lets you create an online hexagonal learning activity to share with your students. To use the […]

Mapping the Thanksgiving Harvest

Where Does Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From? is the title of an Esri Storymap. The storymap displays where eight popular Thanksgiving foods are grown and harvested in the United States. The storymap includes a map for each ingredient. Each map shows the locations of commercial producers. Fun facts are included in the storymap too. For […]

Intro to U.S. Involvement in WWI – And What Kids Say About Tom Richey’s Videos

Tom Richey recently released a new video for students in U.S. history courses. The United States in World War I is a video in which Tom provides students with an overview of why the United States got involved in the war, why U.S. involvement was significant, and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. It’s hard to provide […]

10 Good Resources for Geography Awareness Week

This week is Geography Awareness Week. As academically-themed weeks go, this ons is my favorite. For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed looking at maps and wondering about far-off places. I hope that I’ve be able to pass on that fascination to some of my students. If you’re looking for some resources […]

Two Good Tools for Creating Interactive Timelines

Earlier this week I received an email from a reader named Ashley who wrote, “My classes have been reading Girl in Hyacinth Blue, a reverse chronology of the history of an art work. I would like them to do an interactive timeline to show their understanding of the text. I have never done something like […]

To Geography and Beyond With Google Maps & Earth

I loved Google Earth since the first time I used it. And I have enjoyed teaching it to many teachers over the last decade. That’s why I’m excited to offer To Geography and Beyond With Google Maps & Earth. This course will meet on three Thursday afternoons starting on November 30th. In addition to social […]

Use the ClassTools Power Search to Find Educational Games

ClassTools.net is one of my favorite places to find free educational games and templates for creating educational games. Russel Tarr, a history teacher and developer of ClassTools, has made so many games that the site now needs a power search function. You can use this search function to find games and templates according to the […]

Big History Project

The Big History Project is a free, online social studies course for middle and high school students. It can be taught over the course of a semester or an entire year. Teachers can use the teacher-generated lessons, which are aligned with the Common Core, or they can create their own using the content library. The Big […]

Teaching History With Technology – On-demand PD

Teaching History With Technology is my most popular Practical Ed Tech course after Getting Going With G Suite. In the last year more than 100 people participated in the course. Previously, I have only offered it as a live course that required participants to join weekly webinars. This fall I’m going to offer it in […]

Historical Patterns Animated

Some of my favorite social studies lesson plans include having students use maps to analyze data and identify patterns in history. Over the years I’ve done this with paper maps and digital maps. Mapping History, produced by the University of Oregon, features lots of animated maps illustrating problems, patterns, and events throughout history. Mapping History […]

How to Create a Simple Timeline-based Game

ClassTools.net has many great online game templates for history teachers to use. Play Your Dates Right is one of the templates that I like to use to create a game that is focused on helping students recall the sequence of historical events. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create a simple timeline-based […]

Play Your Dates Right – A Fun History Game

Play Your Dates Right is another great game template developed by Russel Tarr at ClassTools.net. The concept of Play Your Dates Right is that students have to pick the correct sequence of three historical events. The event in the middle of the game template is always the event that actually did come second. Students have […]

Built to Last – Bubbl.us Mind Mapping

Bubbl.us is the third entry into my Built to Last series. This is a weekly series featuring the educational technology products and concepts that have lasted as long as I have been writing Free Technology for Teachers which will be ten years in November. See the first two entries in the series here and here. […]

5 Tutorials on Mapping Stories

In Wednesday’s broadcast of Practical Ed Tech Live I answered a question from a reader who was looking for advice on how to have students create maps based on stories that students read. The person had seen it done at a Google Apps Summit but couldn’t remember the name of the tool(s) that was used. […]

51 Resources for Constitution Day

This coming Sunday is Constitution Day in the United States. That means that schools have to include some type of lesson related to the Constitution either today or Monday. Last week I shared a few resources for Constitution Day lessons. If you’re still looking for some Constitution Day resources, take a look at the collection […]

Constitution Day Virtual Field Trip to the U.S. Senate

Constitution Day in the United States is this coming Sunday. On Friday, Discovery Education is hosting a virtual field trip to the U.S. Senate. The half hour event features a “behind the scenes” look at how the Senate works. The virtual event will include appearances from Senate Historian Dr. Betty Koed, U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee […]

20th Century World History Declassified

The Wilson Center Digital Archive offers many collections of declassified historical documents. The documents contain memos and transcripts of communications between diplomats and country leaders. The collections are arranged into topics and themes. You’ll find collections of documents related to the construction of the Berlin Wall, the origins of the Cold War, Sino-Soviet relations, and diplomatic efforts […]

Good Resources for Constitution Day Lessons

Constitution Day in the United States is just nine days away. By law, public schools are required to include a Constitution lesson during the day. Here are some resources that you might find useful in creating a Constitution Day lesson plan for your students. Keith Hughes, the face of Hip Hughes History, has a long playlist of […]

Membit – Augmented Reality Photo Maps

Membit is a neat augmented reality app for use on iPhones. The app lets you place view images superimposed over the current backdrop that you see through your phone’s camera. For example, you could open the app, point your camera at a building, and then see an image of what the building used to look […]

The Library of Congress Puts Hamilton’s Papers Online

The Library of Congress has put their collection of Alexander Hamilton’s papers online for the public. The collection of papers includes some of Hamilton’s letters to family and friends, a draft of Washington’s farewell address, and documents from Hamilton’s law practice. Additionally, the Library of Congress has put together a simple timeline of Hamilton’s life. […]

Front Row Offers New Science Units for the New School Year

Earlier this summer I featured Front Row’s updated social studies units that complemented their existing language arts units. Over the summer Front Row expanded their offerings to include ten science units. Like all Front Row offerings within the new science units you will find multiple versions of the same article to distribute to your students. […]

Kids Discover Online Offers Great Concept Maps

Kids Discover Online offers excellent reference articles for elementary school and middle school students. All of the articles are offered in multiple versions to match a range of Lexile scores. But that is not all that Kids Discover Online offers. My favorite feature of Kids Discover Online is the concept maps that students can explore. […]

Share Your Sutori Timelines in Google Classroom

Sutori, formerly known as HSTRY, is a great tool for creating multimedia timelines. One of its best features is the option to include quiz questions within a timeline that you share with your students. For the new school year Sutori has added a Google Classroom integration. You can now import your Google Classroom rosters into […]

The Berlin Job – And the Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall is a TED-Ed lesson that was released last week. It’s a fine primer on the basics of the Berlin Wall, but it is not anything that on its own is going to wow a history teacher. After watching the TED-Ed video I went back into my archives to […]

The History Project Has a New Name

The History Project is a great tool for creating multimedia timelines. This morning I went to use the service and noticed that it’s name has changed to Enwoven. I can still log-in using my credentials for The History Project. All of the tools for making and publishing multimedia timelines that were found in The History […]

417 History and Civics Lessons In One Place

On Friday I featured Tom Richey’s YouTube channel which is full of great content for Advanced Placement U.S. and European History students. Today, I want to point out or remind you about the excellent videos that Keith Hughes produces. Keith has at least 417 video lessons about a wide range of topics in U.S. and […]

Google Earth for iPad Now Equal to Android Version

Back in April Google introduced a completely new version of Google Earth for Android and for use in your web browser. This week that new version finally arrived for iPhone and iPad users. Like the Android version of Google Earth, the iOS version features a “voyager” mode for taking virtual tours of places around the […]

A Game for Learning About International Trade

This post contains content that I originally published a couple of years ago. An email from a reader who was looking for suggestions on activities for teaching global trade prompted me to pull these resources from my archive. The multimedia library on The Economist contains a set of cartoon videos explaining some big concepts in […]

Historical Patterns Animated

Some of my favorite social studies lesson plans included having students use maps to analyze data and identify patterns in history. Over the years I’ve done this with paper maps and digital maps. One neat digital map source is Mapping History which is produced by the University of Oregon that features animated maps illustrating problems, […]

View and Print in 3D More Than 200 Objects from The British Museum

The British Museum collection on Sketchfab contains 252 3D models of artifacts in The British Museum’s collections. You can view these models in 3D in your web browser or in a virtual reality viewer. (To view the models in your browser your browser needs to support WebGL, you can test your browser here). If you […]

Explore Street View Imagery With Your Voice

This afternoon at the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp we spent some time exploring and talking about ways that Google Maps, Street View, Google Earth, and virtual reality can be used in classrooms. One of the things that seemed to engage everyone was Speak To Go With Google. Speak to Go is a Google WebVR […]

The Five Most Popular Ed Tech Tutorial Videos of 2017 So Far

Every week I publish a couple of tutorial videos on my YouTube channel. As we’re now more than half way through the year, I thought it would be good to take a look back the the most viewed ed tech tutorial videos that I have produced this year. 1. A Tour of the New Google […]

View and Print 3D Models of Smithsonian Artifacts

Smithsonian X 3D (SIx3D) offers a neat way for students to learn about artifacts from the Smithsonian museums. The site is the result of a collaboration between Autodesk and the Smithsonian Institution. More than artifacts are currently featured on Smithsonian X 3D. The artifacts can be viewed as 3D models that you can virtually manipulate. Many […]

An Interactive Display of the Declaration of Independence

The Digital Declaration of Independence is a fantastic website on which students can learn about the Declaration of Independence and the men who signed it. The Digital Declaration of Independence is an interactive display of John Trumbull’s painting Declaration of Independence, a scan of the text of the Declaration of Independence, and a map of […]

Front Row Offers Differentiated Resources for Social Studies Instruction

Front Row has developed a great reputation over the last couple of years for the differentiated math and ELA resources that it offers to teachers and students. This week at ISTE 17 I sat down with the CEO of Front Row to take a look at the new social studies resources that Front Row is […]

A Comparison of Historic Journeys

I’m writing this as I zoom through the air at 500+ miles per hour to get home after ISTE 17. Just 100 years ago this trip would have been on a train for days. And 100 years before that the journey would have be counted in weeks and months. That kind of comparison is what […]

Mapping Local Art – A Google Maps and Earth Activity

Winslow Homer [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. Whenever I conduct workshops on Google Maps and Google Earth I always point out that there are uses for those tools beyond the realm of geography and history. A recent, popular, example of this is found in the Google Arts & Culture Institute’s Street View imagery of museums. While the Google […]

An Overview of Google’s Public Data Explorer

Google’s Public Data Explorer draws on data sets from the World Bank, the US CDC, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other sources of public data. In all there are eighty data sets. The Public Data Explorer makes it possible to quickly create visual representations and visual comparisons of the data sets. Each visualization you create has a […]

World Population Trends – Interactive Map & Guiding Questions

World Population Trends is an interactive story map series produced on the ESRI platform. Fifteen maps in the series show patterns of change in the world’s population from 1960 through 2015. The maps in the series represent population changes due to birth and death rate changes, life expectancy changes, fertility rate changes, and changes in […]

Teaching History With Technology Begins Today

Now that summer is here in the northern hemisphere many of us have time for the things that we couldn’t do during the school year. That’s why summer can be a good time to take an online course. I’m offering a handful of online courses over the summer. One of those courses is Teaching History […]

Teaching With Trading Cards

Big Huge Labs and Read Write Think offers trading card templates that can be used by students is to create a set of trading cards about characters in a novel, to create a set of cards about people of historical significance, or to create cards about places that they’re studying in their geography lessons. In […]

27 Ideas for Teaching With & About Topographic Maps – From the Archive

Due to an injury and some pressing personal matters requiring my attention, posts for the rest of the week will be favorites from the archive. The USGS offers free topographic maps for most of the United States. The maps can be downloaded as PDFs through the USGS store. The maps can be used in the […]

7 Good Tools for Creating Timelines – From the Archive

Due to an injury and some pressing personal matters requiring my attention, posts for the rest of the week will be favorites from the archive. Timeline creation is a go-to project for many history teachers. When I made timelines as a student and in my first year or two of teaching, timelines were made on […]

DOGO News – Current Events Lessons to Share in Google Classroom

DOGOnews is a student news site that features articles for K-8 students. DOGOnews covers current events stories in the areas of science, sports, entertainment, and variety of topics that fall under the banner of social studies. Teachers can find stories by browsing the categories, filtering by grade level, or filtering by grade level. All articles […]

21 Real World Math Lessons for High School Students

Getting to teach economics lessons is one of my favorite things about being a social studies teacher. In economics lessons high school students start to see how many of the math concepts, logic concepts, and political theory they’ve learned can apply to them in the “real world” after high school. Econ Ed Link is a […]

7 Good Resources for Learning About Mount Everest

Next week many mountaineers will be making their summit attempts on Mount Everest. As long-time readers of this blog may recall, one of my bucket list items is seeing Mount Everest in person. Until then I have to entertain myself with books, videos, and imagery of the mountain. Here are some of the resources that […]

How to Find Old Maps Online

In yesterday’s Practical Ed Tech Live episode I answered a question about where to find old maps to layer in Google Earth. One of the resources that I suggested was Old Maps Online. Old Maps Online is a map that you can browse and search to find historical maps to view online, to download, and […]

My Two Most Requested Documents

Last night I forgot to silence my phone before bed. Not ten minutes after putting my head on my pillow I heard a Google Drive alert. I looked over at my phone to see that someone had requested access to my file titled Life on Minimum Wage. That is one of the two most frequently […]

10 Ways to Use Google Earth in Your Classroom

A couple of weeks ago Google released the new web-based version of Google Earth (take a tour of it here). The older desktop version of Google Earth is still available for free as well. The advantage of the web-based version is that anyone with a Chromebook or laptop can use it. The disadvantage to it […]

5 Good Resources for Teaching and Learning About World War II

This morning I went to the World War II museum in New Orleans. It is a fantastic museum. The museum does a masterful job of mixing artifacts and oral histories into the greater context of World War II. And for folks like me who are fascinated by aircraft the Boeing center is a great place […]

GE Teach Tour Builder – Create Google Earth Tours for the Web

GE Teach is a fantastic project developed by Josh Williams. Josh and his students were some of the first to use the new version of Google Earth in a classroom. In fact they used it before it was available to the public. (Click here for a video overview of the new Google Earth). The new […]

Free, Live Online Review for AP Government Exam

On May 2nd two of my favorite history teachers, Keith Hughes and Tom Richey, are hosting an online review session for students who are taking the AP Government exam. The free, live session will be held at 8pm EDT on May 2nd. You and you’re students can join the session here. Watch Keith’s promo video […]

Lighthouses and Designs for Democracy

Earlier this week the featured document from the U.S. National Archives was a drawing of the Matinicus Rock Lighthouse on the coast of Maine. The drawing is one of many in the Designs for Democracy series published by the National Archives. Designs for Democracy is an online exhibit created by the National Archives and Records Administration. The […]

Hone Geography Skills With These Fun Games

Yesterday, I received an email from Kahoot that featured six games they are promoting along with National Geographic. The games are intended to help students brush-up on their knowledge of U.S. and world geography. You can find those games here in the public gallery in Kahoot. I played a couple of the games and found […]

McCarthyism Explained In a New TED-Ed Video

Earlier this week TED-Ed published a new video lesson that explains McCarthyism. In What is McCarthyism? And How Did It Happen? students can learn the origins of McCarthyism and the actions of HUAC. Students can also learn how some people were ensnared in the actions of McCarthy and HUAC. Take a look at this CommonLit […]

How to Use the Hexagon Learning Template from ClassTools

On Friday I wrote a post that featured links to blog posts about using hexagonal learning in elementary school and high school classrooms. That post also featured the ClassTools hexagons generator. That tool lets you create online and offline hexagonal learning activities for your students. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use […]

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 […]

Get a Free Presidential Timeline Poster for Your Classroom

C-SPAN Classroom is currently offering a free timeline poster depicting all of the past Presidents of the United States. The poster shows each President’s time in office, a short biography, the era of American history in which each President served, and a couple of major events that happened during each President’s time in office. The […]

To Geography and Beyond With Google Maps

When we hear “Google Maps” we often think that it is only useful for social studies lessons. In addition to social studies Google Maps can be used in physical education, mathematics, science, and language arts lessons. Tomorrow afternoon at 4pm EST I will teach you to use Google Maps in a variety of subject areas. […]

Creating and Telling Stories With Maps

For as long as I can remember I have loved to look at maps. I distinctly remember looking at the maps in my third grade social studies book and wondering what people in the middle of the Soviet Union were like. And as I got older I would look at maps of northern Canada and […]

Use Google Maps to Tell a Story Within a Story

Google’s My Maps platform lets anyone who has a Google Account create their own multimedia maps. One of my favorite features within the My Maps platform is the option to create a slideshow of images and videos within a placemark. By using that feature you can tell a story within a story. In My Maps […]

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 […]

CommonLit Added a Guided Reading Mode for Students

CommonLit is a free service that offers a large collection of fiction and nonfiction texts paired to reading questions. You can create a classroom on CommonLit in which you can monitor your students’ progress through the texts that you assign to them. Recently, CommonLit added a new feature that they call Guided Reading Mode. When […]

Storyboard That Offers Lesson Plans for Every Month

Creating a storyboard can be a good way to outline a story, to illustrate your own ideas, or to analyze problems. Storyboard That offers dozens of lesson plans for topics in language arts and history. You will find lesson plans developed around famous literary works like The Outsiders and The Red Badge of Courage. You […]

Pass the Past – A Review App for History Students

Pass the Past is a free iPad app designed to help students review U.S. and World History. The app was designed for students preparing for Virginia’s Standards of Learning exams, but it can be used by any student reviewing for a test on U.S. or World history. Pass the Past offers a large selection of […]

Teaching History With Technology Begins on Monday Night

Last summer twenty-five middle school and high school teachers joined me to learn about tools and tactics for teaching history with technology. So far another 15 are registered for the next offering of the course which begins on Monday night. Registration is still open. The three week course begins on January 9th at 7pm Eastern […]

Classroom Deliberations – Lesson Plans on Current Issues in U.S. Politics

C-SPAN Classroom Deliberations is a good resource for teachers of U.S. history or civics. On the site you will find 34 lesson plans centered around issues currently debated in Congress and in U.S. political discourse in general. A few of the latest lesson plans deal with Electoral College reform, third party candidate participation in Presidential […]

15 Tools for Teaching History With Technology – Best of 2016

As I usually do during this week, I’m taking some time off to relax, ski, and work on some long-term projects for the next year. This week I will be re-publishing the most popular posts of 2016.  One of the things that teachers often ask me for is a set of tools to get them […]

More Than 100 Sets of Primary Source Documents for Students – Best of 2016

As I usually do during this week, I’m taking some time off to relax, ski, and work on some long-term projects for the next year. This week I will be re-publishing the most popular posts of 2016.  A few years ago I wrote a post about searching through the Digital Public Library of America to […]

Explore Maps of Historical Sites in Every U.S. State

The Traveling Salesman Problem is a website developed by William Cook at the University of Waterloo. The site features interactive maps that chart the short distance between a series of places. One of those maps is of all of the places in the United States National Register of Historic Places, all 49,603 of them.You can […]

Free World and U.S. Map Puzzles for iPads & Android Tablets

Digital Gene offers a variety of educational apps for iPads and for Android tablets. Two of the Digital Gene apps that could be useful for elementary school geography review are Enjoy Learning World Map Puzzle and Enjoy Learning U.S. Map Puzzle. Both of these free iPad apps have the same basic types of puzzle activities. […]

Online Activities for Teaching With Primary Sources

As a history teacher I have a natural attraction to old maps, dusty documents, and all manner of primary source media. While it is a passion for me, I fully recognize that learning to read, evaluate, and utilize primary sources can be long process for some students. The following are some of the online activities […]

One Image Inspires a Lesson

This is a guest post from Rushton Hurley. Rushton is the founder of Next Vista for Learning, a great place to find and share educational videos. Imagine starting class without saying anything. The students look at you, awaiting something. You wait long enough to catch their attention, and then project this image in front of […]

Three Ways to Create Year-in-Review Videos

It is the time of year when just about every media company is publishing a year-in-review video. Those year-in-review videos will cover everything from the top news stories of the year to celebrity gossip stories to memorials for famous people who died in 2016. Asking students to create year-in-review videos can be a good way […]

Spend the Summer in Washington D.C. as a C-SPAN Fellow

Summer might be six months away, but it’s already time to start thinking about summer professional development opportunities. Social studies teachers should take note of C-SPAN’s 2017 Summer Fellowship Program. The C-SPAN Teacher Fellowship Program brings together teachers and media specialists to work together for four weeks in Washington, D.C. The fellows work together to […]

Media Literacy & Fake News – A Lesson Plan

C-SPAN Classroom has a new lesson plan that is quite timely given all of the recent stories about fake news stories created and shared through social media. Media Literacy & Fake News is a free lesson plan that is based on five C-SPAN videos featuring authors and other experts talking about the role of media […]

Three Ways to Create Multimedia Year-in-Review Timelines

The year is almost over and for many of us this is a time to look back at the year. Creating a year-in-review is a great way to celebrate our successes and learn from our failures. Creating a multimedia timeline is one way that your students can structure a year-in-review. They can make personal year-in-review […]

An Interactive Map of Pearl Harbor Survivor Stories

Tomorrow marks the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Earlier this week I shared some resources for teaching and learning about Pearl Harbor. This afternoon through the Maps Mania blog I learned about another resource to add to that list. The 1941 Project is an interactive map of Pearl Harbor. The map […]

Two Good Sets of Animated Maps for U.S. History Students

Creating my earlier post about resources for learning about Pearl Harbor prompted me to revisit a couple of animated maps of U.S. History. History Animated is a resource that I first started using with students in 2009. History Animated provides animations of battles of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the US Civil War, and US Campaign in […]

Resources for Teaching and Learning About Pearl Harbor

This coming Wednesday marks 75 years since the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. That attack drew the United States into World War II. Here are some resources for teaching and learning about Pearl Harbor. Five Things You Don’t Know About Pearl Harbor, produced by Military.com, offers five interesting facts about and related to the bombing […]

HSTRY is Now Sutori

Over the last couple of years HSTRY has become a popular multimedia timeline creation tool. One of its best features is the option to include quiz questions in the timelines that you share with your students. Over the weekend HSTRY rebranded itself as Sutori. Other than the name, nothing else has changed on the platform. […]

World Population History – An Interactive Map and Timeline

Last night on the Practical Ed Tech Facebook page I shared a post from Randy Krum that included a visualization of U.S. population growth. Watching that visualization led me to a related visualization about world population growth. World Population History is an interactive map and timeline of the world’s population growth from 1 C.E. to […]

Analyzing Word Choice in a Presidential Statement

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on this day in 1963. Later in the same day Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President of the United States. President Johnson took the oath of office on Air Force One. When the plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base he gave a short statement. His speech card […]

Pic4Carto – Find Creative Commons Images Based on Location

There are plenty of places to find public domain and Creative Commons licensed pictures on the web. Some of my favorite places were featured in this post on Practical Ed Tech. Pic4Carto is an interesting site that I will probably add to that list in the future. Pic4Carto is a site that lets you browse […]

How to Create a Google Earth Tour

Google Earth can be used for all kinds of lessons in math (see Real World Math), science (try these resources), and language arts (try Google Lit Trips) in addition to the obvious social studies applications. One of the best ways to use Google Earth in social studies and in language arts is to have your […]

C-SPAN StudentCam 2017 – Student Messages for Washington

C-SPAN’s StudentCam contest is an annual event that invites students to produce short videos about current issues related to United States government. The 2016-17 version of the contest asks students to deliver a message to Washington about the most urgent issues for the new President and Congress to address. The StudentCam contest is open to […]

Three Ways That Students Can Create Talking Pictures

A couple of days ago on Twitter someone asked me for suggestions for tools that work like Blabberize to let  people create talking pictures. Blabberize is a site on which you can upload a picture and record audio to turn it into a talking picture. To do this on Blabberize you first upload a picture […]

The Origins of Thanksgiving Foods

On Tuesday I shared ten resources for Thanksgiving-themed lesson plans. This afternoon I discovered another good resource for a Thanksgiving lesson. The Surprising Origins of Thanksgiving Foods is a new video from It’s Okay to be Smart (a PBS production). Through the video students can learn how the most common, traditional Thanksgiving foods originated and […]

5 Good Tools for Creating Multimedia Timelines

On Friday I shared a post about using HSTRY.co to create multimedia timelines that include quiz questions for students. HSTRY is just one of a handful of excellent tools that students can use to create multimedia timelines. In the playlist embedded below I provide directions for using HSTRY as well as five other timeline creation […]

5 Fun Geography Games for Geography Awareness Week

On each of the previous three days I’ve shared some resources and ideas for Geography Awareness Week. Continuing that pattern, here are five fun games that your students can play to test and develop their knowledge of geography. GameOn World is a multiplayer geography game developed by a high school teacher and his student in Portland, […]

How to Create Multimedia Timelines on HSTRY.co

HSTRY is a multimedia timeline creation tool that I’ve been a fan of since it launched a couple of years ago. One of the features that makes it different from other timeline tools is that you can build quiz questions into your timeline. HSTRY also offers a collaboration option for students and teachers to use […]

11 Video Tutorials About Creating Multimedia Maps

Next week is Geography Awareness Week. That is a great time to have your students create their own multimedia maps. Yesterday, I shared five map creation activities that your students can do to increase their understanding of geography. In that post I suggested using Google’s My Maps, Scribble Maps, and National Geographic’s Map Maker Interactive […]

Jumble Mode Is a New Way to Play Kahoot Games

Earlier today while creating a chart to compare features of popular quiz game tools I noticed that Kahoot has a new formatting option called Jumble Mode. The jumble mode lets you create quiz games in which students sort answer choices instead of just picking one correct answer from a multiple choice or true/false question. The […]

Resources for Teaching About Veterans Day

This coming Friday is Veterans Day and schools across the US will be closed. Try one or more of the following resources to help students understand the origins and meaning of Veterans Day. Bet You Didn’t Know: Veterans Day. The video explains the origins of the holiday and why its date of celebration has twice […]

A Lesson on the First U.S. Presidential Election

In my previous post I shared a video from Keith Hughes in which he explains the origins of the Electoral College. It’s a great explanation of the original arguments for and against the creation of the Electoral College which has chosen every President beginning with George Washington. Keith offers a lesson about that first election. In three […]

5 Videos to Help Students Understand the Electoral College

A new President of the United States will be chosen tomorrow, kind of. The popular vote which in most states determines how the electors in the Electoral College will vote in December. If that sentence baffles your students, they could benefit from one of the following short video explanations of the Electoral College. This TED-Ed […]

An Easy Way to Find Google Earth Tours

In my presentation To Geography & Beyond With Google Maps & Earth I always share some tips on how to locate Google Earth tours. One of those tips is to refine your Google search by file type and select .KMZ. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to quickly find, open, […]

Avalon Project + Google Docs = Guided Introduction to Primary Sources

Last night in the #SSChat on Twitter I shared one of my go-to methods for introducing students to reading and analyzing primary source documents. That Tweet received a bunch of likes and other responses. What I shared was, “I use the Avalon Project + Google Docs with high school US history students for primary source […]

A Short Introduction to the French Revolution

What Caused the French Revolution? is the title and topic of a new TED-Ed lesson. Like most TED-Ed lessons, the video provides a brief overview of the key points you’d find in a typical middle school or high school history textbook. The lesson introduces students to the three Estates of pre-revolution France, the National Assembly, […]

#TeacherDebate – A Live Lesson About the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Next week on Tuesday night Keith Hughes, Tom Richey, and Nicholas Ferroni will be conducting a mock Presidential debate on Google Hangouts. Keith will represent Clinton’s positions. Tom will represent the positions of Trump. And Nicholas will be the moderator. The event will be streamed and recorded on Keith’s Hip Hughes History channel. Learn more […]

Try Flippity’s Mix & Match Template to Generate Random Story Starters

Flippity is a great website that provides templates for creating games, quizzes, and flashcards in Google Sheets. Recently, Flippity published a new template that could be great for creating random story starters. The latest Flippity template is called Mix & Match. Mix & Match lets you create an online grid that features random bits of […]

NATO on the Map – An Interactive Overview of NATO

NATO on the Map is an interactive map of information about about NATO. The map, viewable in 2D and 3D, displays information about NATO member countries, partner countries, NATO actions, and NATO security challenges and responses. When you visit NATO on the Map you can choose to display information from five categories. Selecting a category […]

Watch & Share Reactions to Presidential Debates Since 1960

Watch the Debates is a PBS NewsHour website that offers videos of the Presidential debate of 1960 and every debate from 1976 forward. The site also includes videos of some debates between candidates for Vice President including the 1988 debate in which Lloyd Bentson famously quipped to Dan Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Watch […]

The National Archives’ Today’s Document Offers Good Lesson Ideas

The US National Archives is a great resource for history teachers to keep in their books. I’ve written about some of their services in the past (here and here) and today I’d like to remind you of the National Archives Today’s Document feed. On a daily basis Today’s Document features a new image or document from the United […]

Electoral Decoder Shows Students the Math of Presidential Elections

Throughout 2016 PBS has been steadily adding more features to their Election Central website for students. Electoral Decoder is one of the recent additions to the site that I discovered through an ad on Facebook. Electoral Decoder uses cartograms to show students the math of the Electoral College. In other words, it shows them that […]

5 Types of Stories Students Can Tell With Digital Maps

When most teachers hear or read about Google Maps, Google Earth, ESRI, and other digital mapping tools they tend to think about social studies topics. While digital mapping tools are perfectly suited to social studies lessons, they can also be used in other subject areas including math, language arts, and science. Here are five types […]

GameOn World – A Great, Multiplayer Geography Game

GameOn World is a new, multiplayer geography game developed by a high school teacher and his student in Portland, Maine. The game is similar in structure to that of Kahoot. In GameOn World the teacher selects a game category (cities, places, and timeline are three of the nine categories) and starts the game. The students […]

The Evolution of Presidential Campaign Commercials

As the campaign for the White House continues to heat up, tonight’s debate should make that clear, it might be a good idea to take a look back at how campaigns have evolved over the last sixty years. The Living Room Candidate is a great website shows visitors how political campaigns have evolved. The Living […]

Identifying Arguments – A Debate Assignment for High School Students

The first debate between U.S. Presidential candidates is happening tonight at 9pm ET/ 6pm PT. Lifehacker has a list of all of the ways that you can watch the debate even if you don’t have a cable/ satellite television. The debate should provide high school students with a good opportunity to learn more about the […]

27 Ideas for Teaching With & About Topographic Maps

The USGS offers free topographic maps for most of the United States. The maps can be downloaded as PDFs through the USGS store. The maps can be used in the 27 suggested topographic maps lessons found in the USGS education site. All of the lessons are rated by grade level and time required for completing […]

You Choose 2016 Teaches Kids About the Presidential Election Process

Last month I featured the classroom debate kits from PBS Election Central. This week PBS published another good resource for helping students learn about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. PBS Kids You Choose is designed to help elementary school students understand some of the key points of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The site features […]

Trace Product Developments Through Google Scholar Patent Search

Last week I was on Facebook chatting with an old friend about an older friend of ours who passed away almost a decade ago now. His name was Steve Gibbs and he owned a successful business that manufactured archery products. Steve’s company sponsored me when I was attempting to make the 2000 U.S. Olympic Archery […]

View 3500+ Art Exhibitions Online

Thanks to Open Culture I have just learned about the Museum of Modern Art’s new website that showcases artwork from the more than 3500 exhibitions that have been held at MoMA since its founding in 1929. MoMA’s Exhibition History site lets you browse through the highlights of every exhibition that has ever been on display […]

How to Create, Share, and Print Thematic Maps

Google’s My Maps and Google Earth tools can provide a great way to create thematic maps. Unfortunately, those tools are quite limited if your students don’t have Google Accounts to use at school. National Geographic’s Mapmaker Interactive is a free map creation tool that doesn’t require students to have any kind of registered account in order to […]

7 Good Tools for Creating Timelines

Timeline creation is a go-to project for many history teachers. When I made timelines as a student and in my first year or two of teaching, timelines were made on paper. Today, there are better ways to have students create timelines. In their web browsers and in stand-alone iPad and Android apps students can create […]

Telling Stories and Solving Problems With Storyboards

Last night I hosted a free webinar about using storyboards to tell stories, illustrate problems and solutions, and to summarize favorite books. The webinar was hosted by Storyboard That. The recording of the webinar is embedded below. Storyboard That also owns the popular Photos for Class and Quick Rubric websites. At the end of the […]

Campaign Comics Templates for Kids

Make Beliefs Comix offers comic strip templates and writing prompts in up to seven languages. The templates and prompts can be completed online or you can print them out to give to your students. Recently, Make Beliefs Comix added templates centered around the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. These new comic templates include prompts for writing […]

Youngzine is Updated for 2016-17 School Year – Great Current Events Resource

Youngzine is a great service that provides teachers with current events articles written for classroom use. I first used the site in 2012 and it has only gotten better since then. Youngzine has been updated for the 2016-17 school year with a fresh and responsive design, new classroom discussion features, and easier sign-in options. Youngzine […]

Three Online PD Courses Starting In October

With the new school year underway it can be hard to find time for professional development. Fortunately, online courses can make it a bit easier to find time for PD as you can join classes from home, work, or anywhere in between as long as you have Internet access. Next month I’m hosting three online […]

Time Is Money – And Other Short Lessons on Money

The majority of the high school students that I’ve had over the years has been engaged by personal finance lessons. This is probably due in large part to the fact that high school age is when many students get their first real jobs. For many students that first pay check comes with excitement followed by […]

Students Can Collaboratively Create Timelines on HSTRY

HSTRY is a neat timeline creation tool that I’ve been a fan of since it launched a couple of years ago. One of the features that makes it different from other timeline tools is that you can build quiz questions into your timeline. This week HSTRY added another nice feature in the form of collaboration. […]

CNN Student News Is Back for 2016-17

For many years CNN Student News has been my go-to resource for current events lessons for middle school and high school students. Every summer CNN Student News goes on hiatus and comes back in late August. This year, for the first time that I’ve noticed, CNN Students News is available on iTunes as well as on […]

A Simple Way to Make Your Own Google Maps Street View Game

Earlier this week I stumbled upon a local radio station’s blog in which they had posted a little game called How Well Do You Know Maine Roads? That game was nothing more than ten Google Maps Street View images that you had to try to identify. The answers to the game prompts were posted at […]

How to Create a Map and Timeline Mashup

myHistro is a free multimedia timeline creation tool. When you create a timeline on myHistro each event that you add can be simultaneously displayed on a map on the same screen. Every event that you add to your myHistro timelines can include pictures and videos. On myHistro you can build a personal timeline or build […]

50 for 50 Writing Contest for Students

Middle school and high school social studies teachers in the U.S. who are looking for a writing project to start the year, should take a look at PBS Election Central’s 50 for 50 writing contest. The contest asks students to draft open letters to Presidential candidates. The letters should include ideas and suggestions on what […]

PBS Election Central Offers Debate Kits for Classrooms

Earlier this year PBS launched a new version of Election Central. That website is dedicated to helping teachers help students understand the process of choosing the next President of the United States. Join the Debates is one of the features of Election Central that teachers should find useful as we head into the last couple […]

Free Printable Maps from the USGS and National Geographic

The United States Geological Survey creates topographical maps of the United States.  The USGS maps can be downloaded for free from the USGS website. The USGS website can be a little tricky to use. Another option is to use National Geographic’s USGS map portal to find, download, and print maps. On that site you can […]

Let the Games Begin – An Interactive Map of Issues Surrounding the Olympic Games

The 2016 Summer Olympic Games begin at the end of this week. The lead-up to the games has been full of new stories about physical, political, and economic conditions in Brazil. ESRI has published an interactive storymap about all of these issues. On Ready or Not, Let the Games Begin you can scroll through a […]

Running Reality – Mapping the Rise and Fall of Nations

Running Reality is an ambitious project that is attempting to build an interactive map and timeline of the rise and fall of nations throughout history. Currently, you can visit Running Reality and choose a date or range of dates on the timeline to see a map of nations around the world at that time. Alternatively, […]

How Much Does It Cost to Run for President?

Now that the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign is in full swing it’s a good time to take a look at how much it costs to run for President. In the video below the folks at Brain Stuff have done a nice job of explaining the cost of running a campaign. More resources for teaching and […]

Quick Current Events Activities from KQED Education

KQED Public Media’s website has a small section of its Ed Space pages dedicated to short current events-based Do Now activities that teachers can use in their classrooms. These weekly Do Now activities present a current events topic, some background information (both text and video), and a couple of discussion prompts. New Do Now activities are posted on Fridays although […]

Lessons on Critical Thinking & Logical Fallacies

Many of the students in my social studies classes over the years have enjoyed a good classroom debate. I am sure that as the 2016 campaign for President of the United States heats up in the fall many classrooms will be having their own little debates. Many social studies classes will also watch portions of […]

7 Free Timeline Tools Compared In One Chart

Earlier this year I published a chart in which I compared the core features of six online timeline creation tools. The History Project is a new tool that I’ve featured twice in the last week so I updated my comparison chart to include it. My complete chart of comparisons of seven timeline creation tools for […]

How to Create Multimedia Timelines

Late last week I wrote a blog post about The History Project which is a site for collaboratively creating multimedia timelines. The History Project includes an audio recording tool that you can use to talk about events in the timelines that you create. I received a couple of questions about that recording feature so I […]

Collect, Customize, and Share Resources from Smithsonian Learning Labs

Late last year I wrote a post about The Smithsonian Learning Lab which is a fantastic tool for organizing the thousands of digital resources available through the various Smithsonian museums. The Smithsonian Learning Lab allows teachers to create and search for documents, images, videos, interactive animations, and lesson plans. In June the Smithsonian put forth a revamped version […]

Mission Mapquest – Create a Map Game That Can Be Played on iPads

Mission MapQuest is a great map game creation tool developed by friend Russel Tarr for his ClassTools.net website. The concept behind Mission Mapquest is rather straight-forward one. On Mission Mapquest you create a series of clues that your students need to follow to identify places around the world. You can add as few or as many clues to your MapQuest […]

The History Project – Like Storycorps With Timelines

The History Project is a new multimedia timeline tool funded in part by The New York Times. Larry Ferlazzo tipped me off to The History Project and I gave it a try this afternoon. The History Project lets you upload your own pictures or import pictures from social networks to add to your timeline. Each […]

GeoQuiz – A Talking Map Quiz

There is certainly not a shortage of map quiz on games on the Internet. GeoGuessr and Spacehopper have been two of my favorites for a long time. Now I have another to add to my list of favorites. That addition comes in the form of GeoQuiz. GeoQuiz is a map game that shows you a […]

A TED-Ed Lesson on the Bill of Rights

The latest lesson published by TED-Ed explains to students why the Bill of Rights was added to the US Constitution. In the lesson students learn about the positions of Federalists and Anti-Federalists, which states pushed for a Bill of Rights, and why the Bill of Rights was added as a set of amendments to the […]

Recording History With Students – Tools & Ideas

Over the weekend at the Native Innovation Education conference I facilitated a short workshop titled Recording History With Students. The focus of the workshop was on helping students record interviews with their elders. We started out by looking at the great questions list offered by StoryCorps. We then moved on to using the StoryCorps.me app, […]

10 Resources for Teaching With Primary Sources – Best of 2015-16 School Year

All of this week I am on the road working with teachers in Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Rather than scrambling to write blog posts at the end of each day, I’m taking this time to feature some of the most popular posts and new tools of the 2015-2016 school year. I’m looking forward to next […]

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 […]

15 Tools for Teaching History With Technology – A Handout

One of the things that teachers often ask me for is a set of tools to get them started on using technology in their classrooms. This is a common request because it can be overwhelming to look at a website or a read a stream of emails with tips and try to figure out where […]

The Origin and Meaning of Memorial Day

Memorial Day is on Monday. Here are a couple of quick resources that you may want to include in a lesson about Memorial Day. The Meaning of Memorial Day is a two minute video covering the origins of the holiday in the United States. The video is embedded below. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs offers […]

Why We Make Irrational Decisions

The Psychology Behind Irrational Decisions is the title of a relatively new TED-Ed lesson that I watched over the weekend. The lesson focuses on the role of heuristics in our decision making processes. Of course, to understand the role of heuristics in making decisions students first need to understand heuristics. The lesson does a good […]

More Than 100 Sets of Primary Source Documents for Students

A few years ago I wrote a post about searching through the Digital Public Library of America to locate primary source documents to use with students. At that point the DPLA had relatively few, loosely organized collections. Yesterday, I received an email from DPLA informing me that they now have more than 100 primary source […]

Stackup – Create & Track Reading Goals for You and Your Students

Stackup is a new service that aims to help you give students credit for time spent reading quality articles online. On Stackup you can create reading challenges for your students. A challenge could be something like “read international news for 60 minutes this week.” After creating the challenge you invite students to join it. Students […]

Four Ways to Explore the News Through Maps

One of the things that I like about CNN Student News is that it almost always includes a map to show students where a story is taking place in the world. I try to do the same whenever I teach current events by showing students a map of where a story takes place. It can […]

Teaching History With Technology – An Online Course Starting Monday

Next week I’m starting a new version of an online course that I’ve offered a few times in the past. Teaching History With Technology is an online course designed to help you learn and develop new ideas for using technology in your history, civics, or geography lessons. Some of the things that you can learn […]

Geopedia – A Map & Wikipedia Mashup

Geopedia is a nice combination of a map and Wikipedia entries. Search for a location on the Geopedia map and you will be shown a bunch of map placemarks around that location. Click on any of the displayed placmarks and you will see a corresponding image and Wikipedia entry. To change locations you can either […]

10 Educational Resources About the American Revolution

Today is Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts and Maine. The day commemorates the anniversary of the first battles of the American Revolutionary War, The Battles of Lexington and Concord. As a New Englander this is a good day to review some good resources for teaching and learning about the American Revolution. Revolutionary War Animated is a great place to […]

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, […]

Another Great Resource for Learning About Mount Everest

On Wednesday I shared my list of resources for teaching and learning about Mount Everest. This afternoon, thanks to Larry Ferlazzo, I learned about another good resource for learning about Mount Everest. Why is Mount Everest so Tall? is a new TED-Ed lesson in which students learn why the peak of Everest is so high, […]

Try the Google Newspaper Archive to Locate Old Articles and Images

Earlier this week I shared the U.S. News Map which is a database of newspapers that displays search results on a map of the United States. The U.S. News Map is limited to the years of 1836 to 1925 and is limited to U.S. newspapers. The Google News Newspaper archive offers a larger selection of newspapers […]

A Mapped & Searchable Archive of American Newspapers

The U.S. News Map is a great resource produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. The U.S. New Map is an archive of American newspapers printed between 1836 and 1925. You can search the archive by entering a keyword or phrase. The results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. […]

An Interactive Cartogram of News

Unfiltered News is a new site that uses an interactive cartogram to help you find trending news stories from around the world. To find stories through Unfiltered News simply open the website and click on a topic listed within one of the circles on the map. Once you’ve made a selection a list of stories […]

Who Owns Antarctica? – A Political Geography Lesson

Who owns Antarctica? That’s an interesting question that many of my geography students wondered and asked over the years. The answer to that question is a clear and simple one. As more people, countries, and companies explore the continent it will become more and more important to define what can or cannot be done in […]

Liberty – The Chronicle of the American Revolution

Liberty, The American Revolution is a feature on PBS.org. There are a couple of resources in this feature that are worth noting. First, and probably the most useful, is The Chronicle of Revolution. The Chronicle of Revolution provides a timeline of events that contributed to the start of the American Revolution. Students can read newspaper […]

Mapping the Emerald Isle – An Interactive Map of Surnames in Ireland

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Today, is a perfect day to share a neat interactive story map produced by ESRI. Mapping the Emerald Isle: a geo-genealogy of Irish surnames is an interactive map depicting the distribution of Irish surnames across Ireland according to the 1890 census. To use the same simply select a name from a […]

A Crash Course on Foreign Policy

Last fall PBS Digital Studios and Crash Course launched a series on government and politics. The 50th and last installment in the series is about foreign policy. The from trade to human rights to environmental concerns the video covers most facets of what foreign policy is and how governments interact with each other. The video […]

Perspecs Shows Students Three Sides to Every Story

Perspecs is a new app that aims to provide users with three sides to every news story. On Monday through Friday the free Android and iPhone app offers a selection of articles about current topics in the news. The topics could be breaking news or they could be topics of a more evergreen nature like […]

PowerPoint Playbook – Animating Numbered Lists

Last fall I featured Tom Richey’s free PowerPoint and video collection for AP US History and AP European History students. Tom’s YouTube channel is full of excellent tutorials for history students. In many of those videos you see Tom’s face in the corner of the screen while PowerPoint slides support his points. Now Tom has […]

Travel the Iditarod Race in Google Street View

The Iditarod Sled Dog race begins today. It’s one of the events that I would love to see in person some day. While I cannot get there in person this year, I can view it in Google Street View. Earlier this week Google published a new collection of Street View imagery capture along the Iditarod […]

How to Find Google Earth Files That Aren’t in the Google Earth Gallery

Yesterday, during my workshop on Google Earth and Google Maps someone asked me if I knew of any files about Rome. I did know about a couple, but I couldn’t find them in the Google Earth gallery. So I turned to Google and did a search by file type. My search was refined to .KMZ […]

How to Use Google’s My Maps in Your Classroom

This morning at the NCTIES 2016 conference I facilitated a short workshop on using Google Maps and Google Earth in the classroom. Both tools are so robust that it is hard to cover everything you can or could do with them in just 90 minutes. To support the workshop I have a bunch of additional […]

Six Timeline Creation Tools for Students Compared In an Updated Chart

Last August I published a chart in which I compared the core features of six online timeline creation tools. Since then one of the tools, Dipity, seems to have gone offline. In its place I now feature History In Motion which allows students to create timelines that are synchronized with placemarks on a map. My […]

Newsela Offers Text Sets About the 2016 Election

Newsela is a popular service that aims to help teachers find current events articles that are appropriate for their students’ age and reading abilities. For the 2016 presidential campaign Newsela is offering a section devoted just to news about campaigns, primary election results, and caucus outcomes. The articles in the campaign 2016 collection come from Newsela’s […]

A Crash Course on Philosophy

Last fall I shared more than 100 animated lessons about philosophy. This week, through Open Culture, I learned about a new Crash Course in philosophy. The new video course stars Hank Green talking about the origins of philosophical thinking. As I’ve come to expect with Hank and John Green there is a fair amount of […]

Reading Lessons for President’s Day

Presidents’ Day (in the United States) is tomorrow. ReadWorks offers a collection of articles and question sets to support your lessons about President’s Day. ReadWorks is offering articles and question sets are available for every grade from Kindergarten through twelfth grade. Every article is indexed with a lexile score. You can download the articles and question […]

The US Presidents in Google Earth

Monday is President’s Day in the United States. In celebration of that day, Google has published a kmz file containing images and links to information about each former President of the United States. You can download the file and launch it in Google Earth or preview it here. The file shows where each president was […]

The First Presidential Election – A Hip Hughes History Lesson

A few weeks ago in my post about the Electoral College I included a list of lessons about Presidential Elections from 1900 through 2012. Those lessons were created by Keith Hughes. This week he released another lesson. Keith’s latest lesson is about the first Presidential election. In three minutes Keith runs-down what made the first […]

How to Compare Maps Side-by-Side in GE Teach

Last week I wrote a post in which I featured using GE Teach to compare maps side-by-side. GE Teach can be a powerful tool when you dive into the features hidden within it. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to access and use the features of GE Teach.

PBS Election Central Helps Students Understand US Election Process

PBS Election Central is a collection of educational resources related to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The collection includes interactive maps, virtual field trips, and videos. Within the PBS Election Central collection there are resources appropriate for elementary school, middle school, and high students. The central feature of PBS Election Central is an interactive map […]

Students Can Compare Maps Side-by-Side in GE Teach

GE Teach is a great map tool that I last featured about 18 months ago. GE Teach is developed and maintained by a high school teacher in Texas named Josh Williams. We had the chance to meet at TCEA this week and chat about GE Teach. GE Teach has gone through a bunch of iterations […]

Dragontape – Remix YouTube Clips

At last night’s TeachMeet BETT Martin Burrett reminded me of a neat tool for remixing clips of YouTube videos. That tool is called Dragontape. If you made mix tapes in the 80’s, the concept of Dragontape will be familiar to you. Dragontaape makes it easy to string together a series of YouTube videos and or […]

Newsela’s iPad App Offers News Stories Sorted by Reading Level

Newsela is a service that helps teachers find current events articles that are appropriate for their students’ age and reading abilities. This week Newsela launched a free iPad app and iPhone app. The Newsela iPad app and iPhone app delivers current news articles to students. The stories are matched to students’ reading abilities. At the end of each […]

Three Thematic Mapping Tutorials

This morning on the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page I received a question from someone seeking a thematic mapping tool that her students can use. My initial thought was to use Google’s My Maps tool. Recognizing that not everyone is in love with Google products, I will also frequently suggest using National Geographic’s Map […]

PBS World Explorers – The Lives & Journeys of Famous Explorers

PBS World Explorers is a new collection of videos from PBS Learning Media. The PBS World Explorers collection includes sixteen short videos about famous explorers throughout history. Some of the explorers featured in PBS World Explorers include Leif Ericson, John Cabot, and Zheng He. You’ll also find the usual suspects in the collection including Marco […]