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.

The degree of difficulty educators face when dealing with new technologies varies, but the sensation of feeling like a “newbie” when it comes to technology can often create tech-wariness among teachers. Educators should not feel this way.

Teachinghistory.org's presentation at the 2011 American Historical Association (AHA) conference, entitled “Teaching and Learning History in the Digital Age,” offered attendees exposure to free and easy-to-use tools that can work for teachers, regardless of their technological abilities. The main message of this presentation? Start small and be willing to face unexpected hiccups along the way.

One educator, nearing retirement, was curious about digital tools as I shared with her the topic of my presentation while walking to another conference event. She was initially interested in attending my presentation but found that the whole topic of digital tools was too complex for her.

Besides, where would she even begin searching for new media tools? She found herself regretting her earlier decision to skip panels on digital tools. It seemed that her own dilemma—where to start looking for digital tools—is not unique. The goal of the presentation was to help educators like her gain exposure to technology that is easily available. My advice to her was the same as I provided the audience: Start with what feels comfortable.

Some educators might enjoy exploring complex tools, “going under the hood,” and learning new skills. Other educators might want a ready-made tool, like Wordpress, to help build a course website. The open-source nature of platforms and browsers like Wordpress, Firefox, Zotero, and Omeka allow daring educators to invent the new plug-ins that can radically transform educational tools. For the less adventurous educators, these platforms allow them to take advantage of the work of others.

The presentation at AHA was, in part, inspired by a recent series of articles by Robert Townsend in AHA's Perspectives on History (Oct., Nov., Dec.). In his findings, which surveyed over 4,000 two- and four-year college faculty, Townsend noted that educators are increasingly embracing digital tools. Nearly 70% of respondents characterized themselves as “active users”—a number that might surprise many. Upon closer inspection, however, active digital users are mostly younger (no surprise here), and the most popular tools are not what many digitally-savvy educators would necessarily consider cutting-edge: digital cameras, scanners, search engines, word processors, and online archive searches. Tools that have the potential to change how we “do” history—text mining, social media, GIS/mapping, and data visualizations—received few responses in AHA's survey.

My immediate reaction to Townsend's articles? Is that it? On the one hand, I found it rather underwhelming to see what passes as “digital history” in the second decade of the 21st century. On the other hand, a utopian view of this subject is probably not well-served considering the budgetary and curricular constraints teachers face; lasting change rarely develops out of radical, or revolutionary, change. A more measured approach would be to acknowledge that significant uses of technology in the history classroom will gradually occur through funding for technology training, or, more likely, through collaborative exchanging of ideas among staff.

The presentation at AHA, then, was structured to address three or four key areas teachers address in their planning stages. As always, these tools are helpful, but only when applied with thoughtful consideration towards teaching and research (several good reads recently posted on Edwired deal with the perils and possibilities of web tools).

Digital Tools for Presentations

• Google Maps is a good instrument for examining memorials, battlefields, and other historical sites, while also allowing users to create new and interesting links between locations.
• Google Earth allows users to create placemarks, polygon shapes, paths, and images on Google's database of satellite images. This is ideal for creating original maps or recreating routes on military campaigns, plotting the Underground Railroad, or analyzing the Great Migration patterns of African Americans to see if new relationships emerge.
• ManyEyes users can upload data and choose visualization preferences that might reveal new information about the past.
• Hypercities uses historical overlays on geographic maps to show change over time
• Prezi is a structural and/or non-structural approach to presentations where you can type text, embed media files, graphically organize items, and highlight the importance of elements—relative to other ones on the infinite canvas platform—based on size and colors. The presentation at the AHA conference used a Prezi.

Digital Tools for Communication

• Facebook and Ning allow users to create networks from scratch to imagine what social networks among Bostonian revolutionaries or suffragettes in the early 20th century might talk about. Multiple other free options exist.
• Twitter lets users publish 140-character updates. What would Abe Lincoln’s Twitter feed look like? What about soldiers on the Pacific front in World War II? John Quincy Adams is already on Twitter!
• Skype can help bring scholars and institutions together, establishing relationships with sister cities, schools overseas, and other individuals and organizations.
• Blogs can become a standard classroom management program (if scholars are not tied to BlackBoard), serve as a professional portfolio, or can help historians re-imagine the possibilities for what scholarship on the web looks like.
• Zotero, in a nutshell, functions like digital flashcards and a note-saving device by adding research items from a database (WorldCat works well), allowing users to create notes for each entry, and providing tagging, sharing, and publication functions. Zotero is a helpful tool for collaborative projects and archiving research sources over time.

Digital Tools for Production

• Anthologize puts together an original book or compilation from blogs and other sites across the web.
• Wiki allows users to develop wiki pages for class projects (upload maps, images, and other files) or research project items.
• Wordle graphically produces a word cloud based on text-mining activities, which often reveals interesting insights otherwise difficult to see in large chunks of text.
• YouTube and Vimeo are hosting platforms for any original video production.
• Picasa and Flickr have potential as forums for hosting photo collections (privately or publicly), helping educators and students find visual sources, annotate information, understand copyright laws, and connect images to historical events that are not visible at first (good places to search for images largely in the public domain include the Creative Commons search engine, Library of Congress, National Archives, NY Public Library Digital Collection, and the Smithsonian).
• iMovie and MovieMaker put users in the driver's seat in using images, text, music, and voiceovers—simple elements of a digital storytelling project—to create original documentaries or short films.
• Animoto is a simple tool that uses images, uploaded with music and text, to create small videos.

Digital Tools for Miscellaneous Tasks

• Mindmeister, FreeMind, and OmniGraffle create graphic organizers for study or for lesson/unit plans, and many of them can be placed online for collaborative work.
• Gaming has untapped potential as a teaching tool; see: Mission US, Do I Have a Right?, BBC History Games, and Playinghistory.org (a good collection of games).
• Diigo provides a way to annotate the web (highlighting and Post-it notes). It can be added to your browser toolbar and, as long as you are logged in, notes will always appear as you re-visit the page.

With such a long list, but one that barely touches the surface of what scholars can do with new media, it is easy to see that free and open-access tools are readily found online. The problem, however, is that many educators feel the same way as our curious veteran educator at AHA. The question “Where can I find these tools?” is still a bit too commonplace these days. As a result, teachers are often hesitant to seek out new technology—not necessarily due to a lack of will, but rather because many simply don't know what (or where) to search.

This presentation aimed at closing that gap in a small way.