Digital Images in the History Classroom - by Stephanie Van Hover

This article is about how digital images in the history classroom can help facilitate all the necessary skills that can be developed, such as chronological thinking, historical comprehension and analysis, historical interpretation, historical research, historical issues analysis, and historical decision making.  The article explains how important the development of the internet is to teaching and learning history.  Before the internet, classrooms were usually confined to using only textbooks and nothing else for the teaching and learning of history.  The internet today provides a much grander scope of teaching and learning tools, such as digital images.  We are now able to search places like the Library of Congress for relevant pictures and information to certain project or lesson plan.  This article explains a project in which students examine historical digital photographs and attempt to ask and answer questions about them.  Then, they go out into their community and take their own photographs of historical items that they find in the community.  They then compare these to historical images found online for a very enriching learning experience.  This is a very useful tool in getting students to practice historical thinking so that they can uncover past events, places, and people and can help their history teachers make history class relevant and meaningful.

Q1:  How, as a future history teacher, can I look at this article and make it useful to me?

A1:  There are several things in this article that I can certainly learn from.  An example is the examining of historical images.  Comparing and contrasting historical images from different time periods can be a very useful exercise in the classroom.

Q2:  If my school does not possess the tools that allow students to participate in a project like this (digital cameras, picture editing programs), how might I take the idea and change it?

A2:  Learning about the history of the community in which children go to school can make for a very interesting and useful lesson plan.  While students may not be able to go out in the community and take pictures, there are other ways to learn the history of the community.  I may be able to have students research online the history of the city or town and compare it with that of a city, society, or civilization that we are currently studying in the classroom.