Contests and Professional Development

 

Make a Meme

It's official, the Montana Meme Contest is BACK in 2026!

Choose and caption any photo from the Montana History Portal for your chance to become the top meme like the one included here from 2025.

DEADLINE: Find photos and submit your entry at https://www.mtmemory.org/pages/memecontest by Wednesday, May 13, 2026. There are three age categories: 

• 10 to 18 years old.
• 19-40 years old.
• 41-120 years old.

This year, teachers can submit student entries work as a group!

SELECTION: On Friday, May 15, 2026, the finalists’ entries will be posted to a collection on the Portal site and opened for voting.

VOTING: The voting period will run from Friday, May 15 – Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. (MST).

The winning memes will be the top two entries in each age group with the most “likes” at the time the voting period ends.

 

Why Play? 

This is an easy way to get students used to looking closely at historic photographs and to get them more comfortable on the portal. Also, it's fun.

Montana Madness

Fort Benton National Historic Landmark won the title of Montana's BEST Best Place in our 2026 Montana Madness competition. Did you play? Did your students? Did a different site win your local contest? If so, please let me know!

A teacher friend of mine who teaches AP U.S. history does a March Madness style competition where she has students select people to compete to be named the Greatest of All Time. Her students debate who should be in the Sweet 16 bracket. She creates ballots using Google Forms and opens voting widely, sending out weekly updates with the new voting link, (I vote every year--and this year's winner was Eleanor Roosevelt) but students are required not only to vote but also to discuss the merits of contenders in Google classroom. She uses it as another form of test review. Something to consider for next year! And if you set up a bracket (for US history or Montana history), I want to play!

Looking for excellent PD? 

Two spots just opened up for the 2026-27 National History Day training cohort. Participants attend the all-expenses-paid workshops in April, August and October 2026 in person, and participate in ongoing virtual trainings. By the end of the program, they will have earned a $1,000 stipend and $500 in classroom materials, 39 renewal units, and gained access to excellent FREE professional development:

• Introduction to National History Day (Bozeman, April 24-25, 2026)
• Historical Thinking through Student Driven Research (Great Falls, August 11-12, 2026)
• Argumentation, Reasoning, and Evidence: Constructing a Historical Argument (Billings, October 15-16)

Learn more and find a link to apply here. (It says the deadline to apply was January 9, but two people have had to withdraw, so the application portal has been reopened.)