I’m going to Philadelphia next week. I’m going to attend the ISTE Conference, but while I’m there I’m also going to visit a few historic landmarks that I’ve not visited in a long time. One of those landmarks is The Liberty Bell.

While looking up the visiting hours for the Liberty Bell visitor center I came across the National Parks Service’s detailed lesson plan about the Liberty Bell. The lesson plan is called The Liberty Bell: From Obscurity to Icon (link opens a PDF). The detailed lesson plan can be used in middle school and high school history classes. The focus of the lesson plan is on analysis of maps, reading, and images to answer a series of guiding questions about the Liberty Bell. 

Reading through The Liberty Bell: From Obscurity to Icon took me down the path of looking for similar lesson plans from the National Parks Service. That led me to the entire collection of 160 Teaching With Historic Places lesson plans offered by the NPS. You can search the collection according to state, theme, or time period. All of the lesson plans follow a similar format of presenting guiding questions and prompts for students to respond to as they look through maps, images, and articles about the historic place. 

I didn’t look through all of the lesson plans, but the ones that I did look through could be modified or enhanced by the use of Google Street View imagery and or imagery from Google Arts and Culture. In the video in this blog post I demonstrate how to find and share Street View imagery with your students.