History Teaching: Guide to Resources

Find or create teaching activities! DocsTeach is a project of the National Archives to engage the history classroom with primary documents. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Lesson plans, activities, professional development resources, state and regional resources, etc. (National Archives and Records Administration)

"Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level."(Zinn Education Project)

Collection of 75 lessons designed to engage students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features sets of primary documents modified for groups of students with diverse reading skills and abilities. (Stanford History Education Group)

Find lesson plans, professional development tools, and more. Search by subject, grade level, and national or state standards of learning. (Smithsonian Institute)

Award-winning collection of annotated links to history web sites, lesson plans, teacher guides, activities, games, quizzes, and more.

Includes primary sources, multimedia content, learning modules, lesson plans, and other resources for teachers and students. (Univ. of Houston)

A teacher's toolkit and list of lesson plans will help teachers find ways to teach with the massive, free primary source collection, Documenting the American South. (Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

Numerous periods and topics in global history presented in flowchart form to assist in teaching. (Chris Butler, AHA-award-winning high school history teacher)

Curriculum materials on various topics, and lots more to come. Also provides new instructional tools: Cause & Effect, Investigate, and Timeline. (U. of California-Davis)

Each thematic issue includes articles and lesson plans. (Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History)

Tips for teaching, learning materials, etc. (California State Univ.)

Large collection of links to history-related resources for teachers and students.

More than 375 lesson plans in history and social studies. Search by grade level, subtopic, or even whether there is an accompanying worksheet. (National Endowment for the Humanities)

Find themed content collections, lesson plans, presentations, activities, and more. Also provides professional development tools for teachers. (Library of Congress)

Free lesson plans on U.S. History, World History, Native Americans, and more.

Free geography, history, math and sociology activities and resources to bring census bureau statistics into K-12 classrooms. Activities are created by teachers and correspond to relevant education standards. (U.S. Census Bureau)

"TeachArchives.org is an innovative resource for teachers, administrators, librarians, archivists, and museum educators. It offers sample exercises and informative articles based on a new approach to teaching in the archives." (Brooklyn Historical Society, et al.)

Tips, strategies, tutorials, and more for History classroom use of technology such as video, Twitter, PowerPoint, blogs, wikis, cell phones, social bookmarking, and many others.

Links to a wide array of online teaching modules and primary source collections, plus tips for teaching students to think critically about history. (Center for History and New Media at George Mason Univ.)

Assessment tools, general instructional resources, primary source collections, articles on teaching, and resources for history teaching assistants (TAs). (The History Education Network, Canada)

Links to numerous Smithsonian collections of photographs, documents, lesson plans, etc. (Smithsonian Institute)

Created by the History Section of the Reference User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA)
From the RUSA History Section: "It is our hope that the Guidelines will be used by librarians, archivists, and teaching faculty to guide teaching and learning throughout the undergraduate curriculum."

Site for locating resources to teach Texas Studies. Includes primary sources; lesson plans; audio-visual materials; staff development; and a lot more. Site also provides an e-newsletter (free subscription) to publicize teacher and student opportunities and promote effective instruction.

Includes tools for teaching with the Handbook of Texas Online, online history quizzes, links to other resources, and lesson plans in Texas history. (Texas State Historical Association)

DH Box is a tool to help integrate digital humanities into the curriculum. From their homepage: "Setting up an environment for digital humanities computational work can be time-consuming and difficult. DH Box addresses this problem by streamlining installation processes and providing a digital humanities laboratory in the cloud through simple sign-in via a web browser."

From the site: "The History Engine project is first and foremost an undergraduate teaching resource that gives students the opportunity to engage in the process of academic research and share their completed work with their fellow students and researchers from around the country. In this section of the Engine, instructors will find all tools necessary to register to use the site, plan a syllabus, and guide students through the project."

Outlines a learning activity for history students to introduce them to data mining, using https://www.mashape.com/.
"The idea is to present students with a purposefully naive example of data mining, working on the assumption it’ll prompt them to critically engage with data mining as a method."

From the LITA Blog, 6 Sep 2016. A great post on creating information literacy learning outcomes for digitally inflected assignments. How do you measure student learning in these types of digital projects?

13 Aug 2018 - "Today I want to specifically focus on the use of data in the humanities classroom—I’ll talk about the 'everyday' uses of data we can map data literacy to, and discuss how we can integrate these data skills into a classroom with limited time for hands-on data work."

"When teaching students how to clean data, it helps to have data that isn’t too clean already. salty is a new package that offers functions for 'salting' clean data with problems often found in datasets in the wild..."