Have your students use a simple, free tool to synthesis their research and tell a story in an interactive, chronological way.
Timeline JS is an open source tool created and hosted by Northwestern University Knight Lab. It is particularly useful to visualize how events fit within a historical timeline - what events overlap, what events were happening concurrently, and how the general zeitgeist may have affected a particular historical period. They can also be used to capture an individual's lifetime or the key points of a specific set of circumstances.
The tool allows you to add in images, video, sound, embed webpages, or focus on text. You create a timeline by adding information to a Google Sheet that is formatted according to the Timeline.JS Template, choosing your style options through the Timeline.JS page, and viewing your timeline through the provided link.
StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. It's from Knight Lab, just like TimelineJS. Your students can use this tool to present what they've learned about historical events.
Historical markers are not always what they seem. They can be misleading or outright wrong, and traditionally, there has been very little oversight or fact-checking involved. Contemporary markers sponsored by the Pomeroy Foundation do require primary sources and careful review, but the same cannot be said of markers from the early 20th century. Can your students tell the difference?
As with any great set of photographs, this collection is rife with possibility.
* Ask each student to choose one of the 300+ images. Have them write a paragraph about the picture, requiring a tie-in to research in a newspaper database like nyshistoricnewspapers.org. For example, if they chose a photo of a building, can they show a Google streetview of the current building? If they chose a circus performer, can they find a circus program from a similar year and a similar county fair? If they chose a portrait, can they find any information about the individual from familysearch.org or a book?