New & Noteworthy

Join Us On Facebook

Visit our new Facebook page and stay up to date on the latest news in history education. Each Wednesday, come visit a new link to interesting sources ready for your classroom. Each month, discover the most popular resources on Teachinghistory.org. Explore here.

Elementary

Helen Keller Kids Museum Online

Looking for an excellent resource to teach children Helen Keller’s inspiring story? This website presents Keller's life through five exhibits. Each exhibit examines a different period of her life, from childhood through her career as an international champion of the blind. Together, the exhibits contain more than 30 photographs. The site also includes a chronology of Keller's life. Read more here.

Middle

People As Primary Sources: Conducting Interviews

How do you teach your students to conduct an oral history interview? The Bracero Archive, which focuses on migrant workers in the 20th century, has a tutorial for conducting oral history interviews. The tutorial provides general advice about setting the tone for the interview and what types of questions to ask, as well as technical advice about using recording equipment. Read more here.

High

Writing to Learn History: Annotations and Mini-Writes

Seeking out pre-writing strategies that help students understand content, think historically, and prepare for culminating writing assignments? Explore this teaching guide that discusses ways to integrate writing throughout the curricular unit allowing students to grasp content, learn how to think historically, and practice writing. Read more here.

Primary Sources

Tech for Teachers

Student Voices from World War II and the McCarthy Era

This website presents transcriptions of oral history interviews of five students who participated in Brooklyn College's Farm Labor Project during World War II. Most of the students were committed to radical politics and journeyed upstate during the summer to work on farms in order to support the war effort. The site organizes excerpts of the words of the five interviewees into four broad sections covering their background and youth, campus life, life on the farm, and life after the project. Explore more here.

Search Engines

Teaching students to search the internet effectively is an exercise in critical thinking and project planning. But let's face it: a Google search for Civil War, for example, yields over 122 million results in about a quarter of a second, and a Wikipedia entry is likely to be among the top five results. Of course, that's not really how we want students to conduct research. Research, in part, is about framing and refining questions. Read this overview to learn how you can teach search effectiveness in your classroom. Read more here.