Ten Books That Shaped America
Just like I do with my weekly newsletter, C-SPAN Classroom sends their weekly newsletter on Sunday evenings (Eastern Time). When I read it last night I learned about a new C-SPAN series that sounds great! It’s called Books That Shaped America and it is presented by C-SPAN in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Books […]
160 Free Lesson Plans on Teaching With Historic Places
I’m going to Philadelphia next week. I’m going to attend the ISTE Conference, but while I’m there I’m also going to visit a few historic landmarks that I’ve not visited in a long time. One of those landmarks is The Liberty Bell. While looking up the visiting hours for the Liberty Bell visitor center I […]
More Than 100,000 Historic Maps for Classroom Use
Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Source 1. Source 2. In this week’s Practical Ed Tech Newsletter I mentioned that digital mapping tools is one of the areas of educational technology that I’m still passionate about after sixteen years and 17,000 blog posts. And making comparisons through the use of […]
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 […]
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?), […]
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 […]
Color Our Collections – National Portrait Gallery Coloring Pages
Color Our Collections is a feature of the Smithsonian Learning Lab. Within the collection you will find coloring pages based on some of the art work housed by the Smithsonian. One of the sets of coloring pages that was recently featured in a Smithsonian Learning Lab email was this collection of coloring pages based on […]
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 Create a Digital Map Collection in Wakelet
Wakelet is a free, collaborative bookmarking and file organization tool that puts things into a nice visual display. So when a former colleague emailed me a couple of days ago to ask for help creating a collection of digital maps Wakelet was one of the first tools to come to mind (Padlet was the other). […]
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 […]
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 […]
My Top Ten Tools for Social Studies Teachers and Students
A few years ago I published a list of my favorite tools for social studies teachers and students. Since then a few things have changed, namely Google has shuttered a couple of cool tools, so I think it’s time to update the list. In no particular order, here are my top ten tools for social […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Founder’s Day Search Lesson – A Classic from my Archives
Tomorrow I am spending the day helping at one of our local Founder’s Day events. Our Founder’s Day is in celebration of Hannibal Hamlin. Hamlin was one of Abraham Lincoln’s Vice Presidents. The picture in this blog post is of his house. If you have followed my blog for a long time and or participated in […]
Short Lessons About American Independence Day
American Independence Day, the Fourth of July, is one week away. Most of you reading this aren’t in school right now. That said, I can’t help sharing a few video lessons about the Declaration of Independence the celebration of Independence Day. Take a look then bookmark these for your U.S. History lessons in the fall. […]
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 […]
The Homestead Act and a Research Prompt
Last Friday the document of the day on the Today’s Document from the National Archives blog was a copy of the Homestead Act passed on May 20, 1862. Seeing the document reminded me of a prompt that I used in a workshop about teaching search strategies that I hosted last summer. If you teach U.S. […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s Patriots’ Day! Resources for Learning About the Start of the American Revolution
Today 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 and a former U.S. History teacher, every year at this time I like […]
A Good Source of U.S. History Lesson Starters
When I taught U.S. History one of my go-to methods for starting classroom conversations about a new topic or unit was to give my students an interesting image or a short primary source document to review and ask questions about. A great place to find those conversation starters is the National Archive’s Today’s Document website. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Artifacts of U.S. History for Teaching and Learning
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 […]
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 […]
The National Jukebox – 16,000+ Early Music Recordings
The Library of Congress offers many interesting collections of digital archives including one called the National Jukebox. I first wrote about it more than a decade ago. Since then the size of the collection has expanded because more recordings have entered the public domain and because the Library of Congress has digitized more recordings. The […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Influenza Archives – A History Lesson
Monday’s featured artifact on Today’s Document from the National Archives was “Nurse wearing a mask as protection against influenza. September 13, 1918.” As is often the case with items in the daily feed there was a link to additional information about the image. In this case the additional information was a National Archives collection of […]
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 […]
12 Good Places to Find Historical Images to Spark Inquiry
Historical photographs, paintings, sketches, and maps can inspire all kinds of history questions. That is why for more than a decade I’ve used and recommended images from Today’s Document from the National Archives to prompt classroom discussion as the introduction to U.S. and World History lessons. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other similar galleries […]
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 […]
Primary vs. Secondary Sources
A couple of times this week I have written about using primary sources in history lessons and or research lessons. That has reminded me of a couple of good videos that can help students understand the differences between primary and secondary sources. The Minnesota Historical Society offers a fantastic video on the topic of primary v. […]
Four Short Lessons About American Independence Day
American Independence Day, the Fourth of July, is tomorrow. I realize that most of you reading this aren’t in school right now, but I thought I’d share a few video lessons about the Declaration of Independence the celebration of Independence Day. Bookmark these for your lessons when school resumes in the fall. History offers the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Three Good Resources for Teaching With Primary Sources
I’m currently developing a new version of my popular online course, Teaching History With Technology (you can see a preview last year’s course here). Part of that process has been revisiting collections of primary sources and some of the tools that I recommend for teaching lessons based on primary sources. Here are three of the many […]
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 […]
Fifteen New Primary Source-based Lessons from Docs Teach
DocsTeach has been one of my go-to resources for U.S. History lessons for many years. DocsTeach offers more than 1,500 primary source activities to use in elementary, middle, and high school history lessons. Additionally, DocsTeach provides tools for creating your own online lessons using primary sources from the National Archives of the United States. This […]
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! […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Few Short Lessons About Labor Day
Today is Labor Day in the U.S. This is the traditional “end of summer” in the minds of many of us. After this weekend nearly all students and teachers will be back in school. If you’re already back in school, you and your students should have enjoyed the three day weekend. Tomorrow you may have […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]