In a recent post I argued the importance of both history and technology in primary grades. I also made the case that both are significant challenges for teachers of young children for a variety of reasons. However, I’m a firm believer that we can do anything we think is important.

Moving to first grade from upper elementary grades meant that I had to think carefully about the technology I used. Some technology carried over quite nicely. I have an interactive whiteboard in my classroom. When we explored timelines we used it to look at one year in a variety of ways and to show timelines from a wonderful, but very small, book. While we record most of our thinking on chart paper we can hang up around the room to reread and refer back to, the interactive whiteboard allows children to manipulate items and ideas. We’ve also used ours to sort images into categories or chronological order.

Another use of technology I continue with in first grade is movie making. Sometimes we use still pictures and sometimes we take video. One example with still pictures is a movie about our responsibilities for school. A large part of the social studies curriculum in the early grades is based around helping students understand their community and their role in it. At our school we have a Home-School Compact for Learning. In order to better understand the students’ responsibilities we created a video with still pictures and with video. I have slowly collected a few digital cameras and a few Flip video cameras. I carry one of each around with me at all times so that I can quickly capture anything that catches my attention during the school day. Other cameras are on lanyards for students to wear around their neck when using them.

First graders in Virginia also learn about the difference between past and present. It is great fun to look at pictures of the past (especially schools, transportation, and daily life) and then send small groups of first graders off with a camera to capture images to contrast with the past. We can then put those into Windows Movie Maker or Photo Story to create a video explaining past and present.

As the year is progressing and my students are gaining literacy skills, I’m introducing them to Wallwisher. This free site allows me to create a wall with a question or topic and my students can add Post-It like items with their thoughts. As they are working around the classroom exploring a topic they can head to our interactive whiteboard to add their thinking. I can also place the wall on our class blog for students to come back to or to add more thoughts. The structure is set for brief writing, which is comforting to young children. It is a great way for us to record our learning and return to it later.

These different options for technology use offer opportunities for presenting information, processing learning, and sharing our thinking. In my next post I’ll explore my favorite, free, online tool in detail.

Congratulations to Stacy Hoeflich, a 4th-grade teacher from John Adams Elementary School in Alexandria, VA, and a 2009–2010 Teachinghistory.org Teacher Representative, who is the 2011 National History Teacher of the Year!

The award, presented by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, HISTORY® (History Channel), and Preserve America, honors K–12 teachers for their use of primary documents in the classroom, the level of inspiration they provide their students, and their career achievements in education.

Ms. Hoeflich received the title and $10,000 award in a ceremony at the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem that included two of her former students, along with James Basker, president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute; Libby O'Connell, senior vice-president and chief historian, HISTORY®; Clement Price, vice chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation; and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Teachinghistory.org's Outreach Director Jennifer Rosenfeld attended the event representing Teachinghistory.org, which sponsored Ms. Hoeflich's nomination.

Dr. Kelly Schrum, Director of Teachinghistory.org, who nominated Ms. Hoeflich for the award, stated, "Hoeflich is devoted to the teaching and learning of history. After seeing the students in her classroom excitedly puzzle over a difficult map created almost 400 years ago or analyze political cartoons from the last century, students leave her classroom with a lifelong interest in understanding the complexities of the past."

An accomplished educator, Ms. Hoeflich has taught elementary school for 13 years. She has presented at local, state, and national education conferences on teaching history and historical thinking with primary sources. As a Teacher Representative for Teachinghistory.org, Ms. Hoeflich provided feedback about the website in order to improve its use by educators.

On Teachinghistory.org you can watch videos of Stacy Hoeflich teaching with maps and teaching with political cartoons.

Teachinghistory.org also has materials from previous National History Teacher of the Year winners. Check out 2008 winner David Mitchell's piece for our roundtable on organizing a U.S. History Survey Course or use 2005 winner Roseanne Lichatin's teaching guide on students working in historic preservation.

Teachinghistory.org is full of resources developed by other award-winning teachers, so be sure to check out our blog, teaching guides, and best practices videos to learn what outstanding teachers from across the country are doing in their classrooms!

A month ago, on June 14th, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released the Nation's Report Card: U.S. History 2010, Grades 4, 8, and 12. The Report Card is the "largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do" in U.S. history, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Approximately 7,000 4th-grade students, 11,000 8th-grade students, and 12,000 12th-grade students in public and private schools across the country took the test, resulting in data that will be analyzed for years to come.

Several professional and educational organizations and publications released responses to the Report Card:

• The History News Network rounded up the reactions of five history professionals, a summary of Report Card findings, and links to news articles and op-ed pieces from across the web;
• The National Coalition for History put together another summary of Report Card findings;
• Education Week published a journalistic overview and summary of Report Card findings, with quotes drawn from official remarks released with the Report Card; and
• the National Council for the Social Studies focused on concerns about the infrequency of the assessments and small sample sizes.

But what is the Report Card? What does it mean? The first step in interpreting the results is to understand the tools used for collecting them. Looking at the structure of the NAEP U.S. history assessments and at the stated goals behind developing and administering them may be a useful way to understand what exactly the results are before trying to understand what they say.

A good place to start is the U.S History Framework for the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress. This document explains the goals of the assessments, describes the structure and rationale behind them, and provides sample questions.

After reviewing this document, head over to NAEP to try your hand at answering sample questions yourself. How did you do? If you want to see more questions from the 2010 (and 2006) assessments, NAEP's item maps let you pull up further sample questions. (Note: When you arrive at the site, set the subject to "U.S. History" in the drop-down menus under "Select new item map," and choose the year and grade level you want to explore.) Questions are labeled with the knowledge or skill they were designed to address and their format (multiple choice or constructed response), related theme (U.S. democracy, the gathering of cultures in the U.S., economic and technological changes, and U.S. world role), and difficulty level.

Once you've gotten a handle on the tools NAEP used to collect data for the Nation's Report Card, read over the Report. It includes charts and graphs with short summaries of conclusions drawn from the data.

NCES commissioner Jack Buckley offered a brief interpretation of the Report's findings, and the press release for the Report Card included further remarks.

(For comparison, you may want to read Commissioner Mark Schneider's remarks on the 2006 findings, as well as the official 2006 release remarks of other experts. Follow the link and scroll down to "2007," "History and Civics.")

Understanding the rationale behind the Nation's Report Card, the tools used to collect data, and official interpretations, you can now investigate the numbers yourself. Using the NAEP Data Explorer, compare test data using filters including jurisdiction (public or private), gender, race and ethnicity, geographic region, eligibility for the National School Lunch Program, disability status, and more.

For a look at data on how the tested students were being taught prior to their assessment, try Classroom Context, a section of the official Nation's Report Card website. Here you can compare what percent of classrooms used primary sources or films, or how many classrooms used computers for certain tasks. The data can't capture actual teaching strategies, but it can provide some general ideas about how history is being presented in the classroom.

Some students in class today may have clear memories of the events of September 11, 2001. Some may have vague memories. Others may have been born years after the attacks. The 10th anniversary of 9/11 presents an opportunity for educators to explore with students what it means to experience history. Were students alive during the attacks? Do they remember them? How do their parents remember the attacks? How did adults they know make sense of the events as they happened? How do people who were alive during the attacks interpret the past when its events are close and painful? How long does it take for historians to find a framework in which to fit events such as 9/11? People watching the World Trade Center towers collapse knew that 9/11 would appear in history books later—what has happened during students' lifetimes that they think was "history in the making?"

One way to teach 9/11 is to compare and contrast it with other past events that witnesses believed were history in the making. Lesson plans often feature the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the assassination of JFK as comparable to 9/11, but what about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The assassination of Abraham Lincoln? The assassination of William McKinley? The Boston Massacre? The Springfield Race Riot of 1908?

How many people witnessed those events? How many of them witnessed them in person? How well were the witnesses prepared for the events? Did they know ahead of time what the effects might be? Did they share their eyewitness knowledge freely with others, or keep it secret? What did people write about these events immediately after they happened? Years after they happened? Does where something happens make a difference in how people react to it? Has technology made a difference?

Regardless of how you choose to teach 9/11 and whether or not you contrast it with other historical events, approach the subject thoughtfully and with clear goals. To honor the anniversary and to help you as you learn about, teach, and remember the day and its effects, we've gathered together our 9/11 resources on one page: "In Remembrance: Teaching 9/11."

Our spotlight doesn't include all of the many resources available online. More examples follow. Some were created in the immediate wake of 9/11 and some were created 10 years later, in the present day. You can use the older materials as they are, or use them as primary sources in their own right. They represent snapshots of writers, publications, and educators trying to make sense of a sudden, horrifying event.

If you are contrasting 9/11 with other traumatic events in U.S. history, you may want to compare these early reactions with early reactions to those events. How did schools, educators, and students react to violence in the past?

From 2001:

• A New York Times lesson plan published on September 12, 2001, suggests ways educators can help students think about and process the attacks.
• A Special Report from Rethinking Schools discusses teaching in the wake of the attacks.
• America Responds, a PBS website, documents PBS stations' responses to 9/11, maintained throughout 2001; it includes nine lesson plans.
• Scholastic catalogs its student and teacher resources published during 2001, on a subsite of its page created for the 1st anniversary of 9/11.

From 2011:

• Recordings of presentations from September 11: Teaching Contemporary History, a two-day conference presented by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Pentagon Memorial Fund, and Flight 93 National Memorial, consider how understanding of 9/11 has changed.
• Articles from the Organization of American Historians on teaching 9/11 draw on memories of 9/11 submitted to websites (follow the link and scroll down to the "Editor's Choice" selections).
• A free curriculum guide from the 4 Action Initiative includes more than 130 lesson plans for K-12.
• A call for teachers from the New York Times asks educators to contribute their strategies for teaching 9/11, and a later article pulls together NYT resources
• Two simple timelines look at themes related to the attacks at Pearson's Online Learning Exchange
• A free oral history lesson plan from Brown University's Choices program
• EDSITEment's lesson plans on 9/11 and heroism

Many websites and publications also offer primary sources, yet to be interpreted for educational use or packaged into lesson plans. If you have the time to search for and browse these materials, they can provide a rich base from which to assemble your own comparison of past and present. Here are some examples:

• The New York Times' "Times Topics" page collects all NYT articles and photographs that mention 9/11. It archives original coverage of September 11 and NYT anniversary pages from 2002 to 2006, as well as short biographies memorializing the victims of the attack (see "Portraits of Grief").
• Lectures and panels from Columbia University respond to and attempt to contextualize 9/11.
• Columbia University also created a guide to key documents on presidential, administrative, congressional, and international responses to 9/11.
• Archived television footage from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and NBC spans September 11–13.
• Legacy.com's Remember: September 11 preserves biographies of the 9/11 victims, searchable by name, home city and state, and flight.
• Sourcebooks from the National Security Archive gather up primary sources related to U.S. policies on terrorism, Afghanistan, biological warfare, anthrax attacks, the Taliban, and Osama Bin Laden.
• More than 50 eyewitness interviews share memories on topics such as "Hijackers," "FBI," and "1993 WTC Bombing," courtesy of National Geographic.
• The American Red Cross's Exploring Humanitarian Law curriculum, while not focused on 9/11, models strategies for teaching about difficult subjects and thorny emotional and ethical questions.

Soaring food prices, a hunger for locally grown produce, high obesity rates, and the desire by people to reconnect with nature and with each other have sparked a national renaissance in community gardening. As part of this movement, school gardens are sprouting up everywhere. Teachers are using these green spaces to teach a variety of subjects, including horticulture, nutrition, history, science, math, writing, and art.

The idea of incorporating gardens in schools began in the late 19th century when Henry Lincoln Clapp, a teacher at the George Putnam Grammar School in Boston, MA, established the first school garden. Inspired after visiting school gardens in Europe, Clapp created a wildflower and vegetable garden at Putnam in 1891 with support from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The establishment of school gardens soon spread throughout the state and eventually became a nationwide movement, with an estimated 75,000 school gardens by 1906.

For garden advocates, integrating school gardens in the public schools served many purposes. It was a way to get city children outside, engage them in physical activity, and instill in them a sense of pride and teamwork as they cultivated and maintained their gardens. Gardening classes provided students with vocational and agricultural training. Teachers taught a variety of subjects through garden activities. Students practiced writing by keeping planting journals and writing compositions about the garden. Math skills were acquired by counting seeds, measuring garden plots, and determining the appropriate soil depth for planting. Students learned botany and entomology by observing plants and insects and their interrelationships. Geography and history came into play when students studied the origins of fruits and vegetables and planting customs among different cultures. The gardens provided inspiration for drawing, painting, and performing music. In 1914, the federal government established the Bureau of Education’s Office of School and Home Gardening, which promoted school gardens and provided “how-to” pamphlets and course guides.

Children’s involvement in gardening took on a new urgency when the United States entered World War I in 1917. In order to provide food to European allies facing a food crisis and to U.S. troops fighting overseas, citizens were encouraged to grow food for domestic consumption as part of the war garden campaign. Children were enlisted to join the School Garden Army, which adopted the motto, “A garden for every child, every child in a garden.” Students became important contributors to the garden campaign, growing thousands of dollars worth of produce in their school and home gardens.

When the United States entered World War II, children once again played an active role in growing fruits and vegetables to assist in the war effort. During the war, citizens were encouraged to establish victory gardens in their backyards, vacant lots, and schools to provide food for civilians and troops. Gardening was also promoted to boost morale, encourage physical activity and healthy eating and to help Americans deal with the stresses of war. The U.S. Office of Education encouraged victory gardening at schools and promoted school lunch programs that served locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables. The Boy Scouts of America, 4-H clubs, parks and recreation departments, churches, and many civic organizations were involved in victory gardening programs for children. In 1944, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that victory gardens produced 40 percent of the vegetables that were consumed nationally.

The post-war suburban housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s generated more interest in backyard gardening than in community gardening. This changed in the 1970s when rising food prices, an increase in environmental awareness, and a desire by citizens to revitalize neighborhoods plagued by crime and neglect sparked a new community garden movement. Citizens and non-profit groups, such as Boston Urban Gardeners and New York’s Green Guerillas, turned vacant lots into colorful, productive green spaces. The U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the Urban Garden Program in 1976 to help residents in major cities grow their own food. Educators and activists who were concerned that children were disconnected from nature and unaware of where their food came from reached out to young people and encouraged them to participate in neighborhood, youth, and school gardens. In a 1974 article in the Washington Post, writer Henry Mitchell noted that in Washington, DC, “there are 1,000 small gardens about town in which children grow such plants as the radish, the onion, and (as the weather stops being barbarous) the tomato.”

Since the 1970s, the popularity of school and youth gardens has grown steadily. California took the lead in 1995 by launching the “Garden in Every School” program. As in the school garden movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, teachers are utilizing these outdoor classrooms to teach a wide range of academic subjects through hands-on experiential activities. In addition, educators are using school gardens to encourage a healthier lifestyle, promote environmental stewardship and provide students with the opportunity to develop leadership and team-building skills.

These free resources provide ideas on how to incorporate school gardens into the academic curriculum, including social studies:

• Gardens for Learning—Creating and Sustaining Your School Garden by the California School Garden Network.
• Kidsgardening.org has a “Digging Deeper” section with ideas for many classroom activities.
• Getting Started: A Guide for Creating School Gardens as Outdoor Classrooms.
• GARDENABCS.

When the 13 colonies first rebelled against England, they called on the help of established nations—including France and Spain—to succeed. After the Revolutionary War, the newborn United States gradually began to take part in world affairs itself, making payments and treaties, waging war, and withholding or offering aid. Today, the U.S. maneuvers its way through a constant web of decisions. Who does it choose to help and how? What kind of aid should it offer? Military? Economic? Social? When and why does it withhold aid? How have the choices it makes today grown out of those made in the past?

Following the March 11 earthquake that rocked Japan, your students may have questions about the U.S. and international aid. Or maybe they're curious about the uprisings in the Middle East, a part of the world with which the U.S. has a complicated history of trade, war, and aid.

A good place to start learning about U.S. aid history is, appropriately enough, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Established in 1961 in an effort to separate non-military and military aid, USAID combined the social and economic aid efforts of a number of smaller initiatives under one "roof." Though the website's history page is dense, it provides a sense of the complexity of aid issues. If you want to dig a little deeper (and read a little more), download the primer on USAID. (The section on "Responding to Crises" may be particularly relevant right now.)

For statements on current events, check out the Senior Staff Speeches and Testimony section. Press releases also feature current information. For a broader view, search by location to learn more about USAID's work in Haiti, Egypt, Thailand, and other nations. Browse issues of USAID's newsletter, FrontLines, starting in 2003, to see what's been given the most press in the past few years.

Ready to head further back in time? In our Ask a Historian feature, look at aid in the Middle East, both non-military and military, during the 1950s.

Skip back a few years more and learn about the Marshall Plan, a well-known precursor of USAID designed to help Europe rebuild following World War II. USAID's small online exhibit on the Plan features audio, visual, and text primary sources, while the Library of Congress hosts an exhibit on the Plan. If you need more primary sources, try the document collection Truman & the Marshall Plan at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum.

Of course, U.S international aid didn't begin with the 20th century and isn't limited to the federal government. Read up on the history of the American branch of the Red Cross, an organization founded by Clara Barton in the late 19th century. (The bibliography in the "Students" section recommends American author Pearl S. Buck's 1948 children's novel The Big Wave for learning about tsunamis. You might consider introducing this novel to students as a primary source itself, reflective of Buck and the context in which she wrote.)

Consider having students trace the U.S.'s relationship with a particular country or region back in time. For instance, what part is the U.S. playing in events in Libya now? What is our stance on the country and events there? What was it back in the early years of the U.S.? (For an idea, listen to historian Christine Sears describe the First Barbary War, one of the U.S.'s early overseas conflicts.) Between then and now, how has our position changed and evolved? Have we given aid or taken it away? When and how?

As it has grown in power, the U.S. has shifted in its relationship to other parts of the world again and again. Exploring the history of international aid might help you (or your students) follow these shifts through time and gain a better understanding of responses and relationships today.

The bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth was celebrated in 2009. This year, 2011, marks a related sesquicentennial. Sesqui? What's that? It means "one and a half," and a sesquicentennial marks something's 150th anniversary. In 1861, 150 years ago as of April 12, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, SC, and the American Civil War began.

Historical sites, museums, societies, and other organizations have been gearing up to celebrate this anniversary for months, if not years—and as educators you can take advantage of their materials and events.

Looking for digitized primary sources? Downloadable lesson plans? Interested in planning a field trip? Your state (as well as your local community) may have new resources available, or in development, for you.

Many states have chosen to make the sesquicentennial an official affair, overseen by a committee or commission recognized by the governor. The websites created by these groups vary widely in quality, but they're a good starting place for exploring the sesquicentennial. Many include timelines, calendars of events, digitized primary sources, educator sections, directories of historic sites, discussion forums, and other resources. The following states have publicized their sesquicentennial preparations online:

• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Connecticut
• Delaware
• Georgia
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Kentucky
• Maine
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Pennsylvania
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Vermont
• Virginia
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin

What states aren't here? Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming do not currently have state Civil War commissions. Illinois may have one forming, and Louisiana may have one that has no web presence.

Ask your students to think about this list. Why might these states not be celebrating the sesquicentennial? The answer for some of them should be clear—they weren't states at the time! Yet textbooks emphasize disagreement over whether slavery should extend into the territories as one of the causes of the Civil War, and history certainly didn't stop happening in these regions during the war.

Consider giving your students a state. Maybe you want all of them to study your own state's Civil War history. Ask them to look at how your state is commemorating the sesquicentennial. What Civil War sites are located in your state? Are they preserved? What was happening in your state in 1861? How much of its history in that year was driven by the Civil War? Were there major events that seemed unrelated to the war? What events seem to be talked about most often in your textbook and the resources about your state's 1861 history that you can find? What events are given very little space? Does your state have a history of celebrating Civil War memorials? What kind? Have celebrations changed over time?

You might also give each student a different state. Include wildcards, like Hawaii and Alaska, that weren't even territories at the time. Have them research 1861 in their state histories. What was happening in each state (or the areas that would become their states)? How much was related to the Civil War? Were there events that your students think deserve commemoration (even if they weren't related to the war)? Have them put together a theoretical sesquicentennial commemoration for their state, celebrating the year 1861. Remind them that events don't have to be Civil War-related!

If you've looked through the sesquicentennial websites above and can't find resources to suit your needs, try searching our Website Reviews. We've visited more than 300 websites with resources on the years 1850–1877, and annotated all of them.

However you want to approach Civil War history, chances are good you'll find a site with relevant resources cataloged here.