The Digital Public Library of America is a great place to find all kinds of neat digitized historical artifacts. I recently went down a rabbit hole looking at photographs in the baseball collection and the DPLA’s Boston Sports Temples exhibit. That happened because I was revisiting the DPLA’s Primary Source Sets for teachers and students.

The Digital Public Library of America’s Primary Source Sets organized according to themes, eras, and events in United States history. The DPLA primary source sets include documents, drawings, maps, photographs, and film clips. Each set is accompanied by a teaching guide. All of the sets can be shared directly to Google Classroom. And each artifact that students view in the sets is accompanied by some questions or points to ponder while reviewing that artifact.

Applications for Education
The DPLA’s primary source sets provide teachers and students with a convenient way to find primary source documents. For teachers it can be a good way to locate resources to use in a lesson plan. For students the sets can provide a good start to a research project.

On a related note, in Teaching History With Technology I’ll show you some ways to use primary sources like those from DPLA in online lessons.