The document provides recommendations for using technology in the history classroom, including several websites containing primary sources and interactive activities. It recommends using technology to enhance research, interactivity, and access to multimedia resources. Specific strategies outlined include using advanced search functions, interactive timelines and wikis, and showing historical videos and images to help students connect to the past. It also describes the Visual Learning Strategy technique of analyzing historical photographs through questioning.

1. Technology in the History Classroom
By Bill Kerney – bkerney@hotmail.com
Distance Education Consultants / Anodyne Professional Development
Professional Development ° Evaluation ° Software ° Grantwriting
I. Top History Resources
[ ] – The best American history resource is the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov. Be sure to look
at their extensive collections of maps, photos, music, and other primary documents. They also have a
great section for teachers, which include lesson plans, PD, and fabulous classroom materials.
[ ] – The other must-visit site is the National Archives: http://www.archives.gov/. It not only has an
amazing number of primary documents available online, but they have also created valuable collections
of these documents, and have a wonderful teacher resources section, containing lesson plans,
classroom materials, and online “exhibits”. They also have three sub-sites very much worth visiting:
[ ] – The Prelinger Archives. Rick Prelinger was a teacher that gathered up ephemera from
schools around as they were throwing out their old A/V materials. He eventually assembled a unique
collection of 60,000 slices of American life (advertisements, public service announcements, etc.) and
donated it to the National Archives. Be sure to watch A Trip Down Market Street and Duck and Cover:
http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger
[ ] – DocsTeach: http://docsteach.org/. DocsTeach is a relatively new site that uses Web 2.0
technology in a very powerful way – by letting students interact with primary documents online. As a
teacher, you can create online activities for your students, or use their pre-built ones, such as comparing
and contrasting recruiting documents for African Americans during the Civil War. They have hand-picked
many of their most interesting documents on this site, so you don’t need to go through all the archives.
[ ] – Digital Vaults: http://www.digitalvaults.org. This amazing website is an interactive front-
end to the National Archives collection. It shows previews of documents in its collection, and then
interactively explore connections between these documents and others. For example, clicking on the
photo of a soldier in WWII might bring up a hundred photos of soldiers from other time periods. These
objects all link back to collections in the National Archives, and you can put them into your own
collections, online activities, and create movies from them.
[ ] – CaliSphere: http://www.calisphere.org. For California history resources, this is the #1 site. It has
oodles of primary documents from California history, and a really fascinating interactive Google map
that shows you the location of where photos on a certain topic (natural disasters, etc.) were taken.
[ ] – Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/. Everybody uses Wikipedia these days – and in general it is
pretty good. But it should be used only as a starting place for research, not a final place. It is editable by
everyone, so a certain amount of vandalism and bias exists on the site, so be cautious.
[ ] – The Presidents: http://millercenter.org/president. Everything about presidents, including speeches.

2. [ ] – MLK’s I Have a Dream Speech: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm
[ ] – I have prepared a list of 204 more of my favorite history resources for you. You can access it at:
http://www.distanceeducationconsultants.com/204.pdf
II. Technology in the Classroom
It is very important to use technology properly in the classroom – in other words, only when there’s a
benefit to it above and beyond what a teacher or textbook could accomplish without the technology.
There’s three main areas that technology shows its worth: research, interactivity, and multimedia.
[ ] – Research. Most people know to go to Google, type in the search term they are looking for, and then
click on the first couple links that come up. (Usually, Wikipedia.) However, when doing research for
history, modern terms accrete over historic meanings, making it hard to find what you are looking for
some time. Learn the Google “advanced search” options to filter out the dross, especially 1) The minus
operator to filter out terms, 2) Adding more terms, and 3) Using the “exact phrase” operator.
[ ] – Interactivity. Web 2.0 sites, such as the DocsTeach site above, allow students who need that hands-
on learning modality to be able to go beyond the textbook and really dig into material to learn it. Other
Web 2.0 sites connect kids with kids, with powerful results. Some wonderful Web2.0 sites for education
include:
[ ] – Blogging: Edublogs (http://edublogs.org/) for weekly blogging activities.
[ ] – Timelines: Create interactive timelines on sites like Dipity (http://www.dipity.com/)
[ ] – Chats: Use Skype (www.skype.com) or Chatzy (http://www.chatzy.com/) to connect with
other students in the classroom for live discussions, or with people from around the world.
[ ] – Wikis: Sites like Wikispaces (http://www.wikispaces.com/content/teacher) allow you to
create free wikis for your classroom, which can be a powerful and interactive way to teach history.
[ ] – Interactive Learning sites: http://www.brainpop.com/, or (shameless plug), History
Adventure, a 3D website we built that contains a full standards-aligned curriculum for US History at the
elementary, middle, and high school levels. Here’s an example museum for 5th Grade Native Americans:
http://www.distanceeducationconsultants.com/worlds/icoe_museum5-1/index.html. (You’ll need
Internet Explorer to view the site, and it’ll ask you to download a plugin to run the 3D software.)
[ ] – Non-interactive Learning sites: Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/) or Apple’s
iTunesU (available within iTunes) are wonderful sources of lectures on history and other subjects.
[ ] – Cicero: http://www.trycicero.com/. Run by the American Institute for History Education,
CICERO is a wonderful website containing US history lessons, lesson plans for teachers, standards
alignment across all 50 states, materials and handouts for use in the classroom, quiz games, and much
more. It also has high quality professional development lectures for teachers built into it.

3. [ ] – Multimedia. Showing students primary video footage, or audio recordings, of the past is one of the
best ways of connecting students to the past and making it “real” for them. As mentioned above, the
Prelinger Archives are a wonderful source of primary video footage of the past (to show how different
the world was, just show them video footage of old cigarette commercials!), and the Miller Center’s
President Project has audio recordings and transcripts of presidential speeches from the last century.
[ ] – YouTube. Although we know YouTube mainly as the place where people go to upload
videos of their cats, there’s a surprising amount of history content on YouTube. Search for “The Civil War
in 4 minutes” or just your favorite event from history – odds are that you’ll find something useful. Also,
be sure to look up the National Archives history channel: www.youtube.com/user/usnationalarchives
[ ] – If you want to download videos from YouTube for use in the classroom, use sites like
Zamzar (http://www.zamzar.com/) or Mediaconverter (http://www.mediaconverter.org/)
[ ] – United Streaming (now Discovery Streaming): http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com. If
you have the money to pay for it, this site has more documentaries than you can shake a stick at.
[ ] – For an amazing site of people’s personal stories, look into http://storycorps.org/. You can
even give your students an assignment to interview people in their neighborhood, and upload them.
[ ] – Google Image Search is the easiest way to find historical images, outside of the
aforementioned National Archives and Library of Congress sites. Also, you might want to try Flickr.com.
[ ] – For finding music aligned with history subjects, either Google it directly (“Music from the
Civil War”) or go to a site like Contemplator (http://www.contemplator.com/america/) which lists a
number of historical songs, sorted by subject. I love Irish music, and so Wikipedia pages that sort them
by time period and subject such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irish_ballads are wonderful.
III. VLS
One of the more powerful teaching strategies I’ve seen used in the classroom as an evaluator is
something called VLS (Visual Learning Strategy). It is based on the fundamental principle that the first
time we experience a work (photograph, movie, song, etc.) we do not fully understand or grasp it.
Instead, we need to spend quite a bit of time just on a single object in order to absorb all of the
information contained within it. After doing VLS with students for a while, they greatly improved their
abilities to quickly analyze and understand historical objects, so I’ll go over the basic method with you:
[ ] – Put up a photo on the overhead projector. Don’t say anything about the photo, just let the
kids sit there in silence for several minutes, absorbing details about it.
[ ] – Start by asking low level, factual questions: “What do you see?” Try to keep them from
guessing the meaning of the photo in this stage, simply have them point out interesting features in the
photo itself, such as the torn sleeve of a character, or the happy expression on a person’s face.

4. [ ] – The move up to mid level questions. “What time period do you think this is?” “Where do
you think this is?” Never tell them what the right answer is – the purpose is to encourage inquiry and
guessing in the students. Acknowledge or praise their guesses when it is based on evidence. Ask “Why
do you think that?” a lot.
[ ] – Move up into high level questions. “What do you think the photographer is trying to say in
this photograph?” “What do you think is going on in this photo?” Again, ask the kids for reasons for why
they think that they do.
At first, many students will have trouble with the process, as they’re not used to simply guessing (“But
what is the right answer??”) or to finding interesting details in photos, but as you do it with them more
often, they’ll become absolute detectives at pulling out details from photographs and analyzing them.
The process also works with video and music. You’ll probably need to play them several times, though,
so it can take longer. But video and music can make powerful connections with the past.
One of my favorite Irish songs is called Foggy Dew. (Not to be confused with “The Foggy Dew” or “The
Foggy Foggy Dew”, which are totally different.) You can listen to the song here:
http://youtu.be/dSs2VJBfOUo for a faster version, or http://youtu.be/Xe8zF_ZEAts for a slower version
with lyrics (worse audio quality, though).
You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foggy_Dew_%28Irish_ballad%29
And my analysis of the song is here:
http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858727556/
It is a beautiful song, and wonderfully ambiguous in the morality of the actions described. If you do this
with your students, finish by asking them: “Was the author of the song in the moral right, or not?”
If you like such traditional music, and want to learn more about them, the community on
http://www.mudcat.org/ has the best collection of experts anywhere on the planet.
Other good Irish traditional songs for the history classroom (all by The Dubliners, since I love them):
[ ] – Skibbereen – On the Irish Famine. http://youtu.be/DP8PB3viZck
[ ] – Alabama ‘58 – On the Civil Rights Movement. http://youtu.be/0iSIGBgS_Wk
[ ] – Champion at Keeping Them Rolling – On Unions. http://youtu.be/v6D4McgMTVE
[ ] –Springhill Mining Disaster – On a coal mining disaster. http://youtu.be/2wQYdmqK6Tk
[ ] – Spancil Hill – On leaving Ireland for California, and dying there. The author wrote the poem
as a last letter to his love in Ireland, who never remarried. http://youtu.be/qQDF53L_C9g
[ ] – Down by the Glenside. Beautiful; on Irish independence. http://youtu.be/Y_CrGMu83aw
Used in the John Wayne movie Rio Grande to mourn the Civil War dead: http://youtu.be/KxVbIC2lvls