Teaching with Historic Photos

Did you know? The Montana Historical Society has added 650 Evelyn Cameron and 577 L. A. Huffman photographs to the Montana Memory Project! This means you and your students can access amazing pictures documenting the eastern Montana, like this one taken by L. A. Huffman between 1910 and 1930 (MHS 981-836):

These photos join many other collections on Montana Memory, including 555 stereographs by N. A. Forsyth. taken from circa 1901 to circa 1911. mainly of Butte.

For ideas of how to use historic photographs (and for other sources of great images) check out some of these posts, including this one that describes the Crop It tool and this one that talks about using images to complement literature studies.

Looking for ready-made lessons? Check out  Picturing the Past: Understanding Cultural Change and Continuity among Montana's Indians through Historic Photographs, a two-day learning activity designed to complement Chapter 11 of the Montana: Stories of the Land textbook, and the Montana Women at Work: Clothesline Timeline Lesson Plan.  

And one more cool thing. Techies among you probably already know this, but I just found out that Google Images will search images. Go to Google Images. Click on the the camera icon, enter the photo URL or drag and drop and image from your hard drive (or phone) into the search box. Voila! (I learned this cool trick from Glennw at http://doingsocialstudies.com/. It is a great blog--worth checking out.) I'm imagining online scavenger hunts and other cool activities using unidentified photo sets to introduce a new unit. What are you imagining?