As a history teacher I was always looking for valuable resources to use in lesson plans. With the decrease in educational spending in most countries this has placed an increasing burden on classroom educators. A good friend, Bonnie Bracy has sent me a excellent list of these resources. I am indebted to her for pointing me in the right direction.
NOTE: The listing here is not meant to be an endorsement.
Teaching History is an excellent resource for history teachers. It provides them with a wide variety of materials and resources to improve history education in the classroom. Teaching History, which is funded by the American Department of Education, is designed specifically for k-12 history teachers to help them access teaching materials such as lesson plan reviews, videos, and teaching guides. The content of Teaching History is organized into three main categories: Teaching Masterials: this is where you can browse through an array of lesson plans, and teaching guides to use in the teaching of history to your K-12 students. History Content: this is where you can locate quality historical resources and reliable content from across the web. Best Practices: this one introduces teachers to different strategies and approaches to engage students discussion of primary sources and encourage them to exercise historical thinking.
School History is a website that provides a wide variety of teaching materials for history teachers. These materials are arranged into different categories such as online history lessons, interactivities, interactive games, and interactive quizzes. This site also provides over 600 free downloadable worksheets and PowerPoint presentations. There is also a History Help Forum where teachers post tips an pieces of advice on everything related to the teaching of history.
History On The Net is a website that provides free resources and materials for history teachers. These resources cover a range of historical topics such as : Ancient History, Middle Ages, American History, and General History. It also features online lessons and worksheets, games, and history references.
History Mad is a cool site that features easily accessible history materials for teachers. Teachers can browse the different topics displayed in the homepage and each topic incorporates numerous resources related to it.
Library of Congress Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world that provides a wide variety of primary source materials including millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts.
National Archives National Archives is a repository of legal and historical documents and records as provided by the federal government of the United States. “Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you”.
Digital Public Library of America The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an all-digital library that aggregates metadata “” or information describing an item “” and thumbnails for more than 7 million photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the ?united ?states.The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
Docs Teach Docs Teach provides thousands of primary source documents that span the course of American history. to bring the past to life as classroom teaching tools from the billions preserved at the National Archives. Use the search field to find written documents, images, maps, charts, graphs, audio and video in our ever-expanding collection that spans the course of American history.
Hisorypin Historypin is a way for millions of people to come together, from across different generations, cultures and places, to share small glimpses of the past and to build up the huge story of human history. Everyone has history to share: whether its sitting in yellowed albums in the attic, collected in piles of crackly tapes, conserved in the 1000s of archives all over the world or passed down in memories and old stories.