By the OER Project Team We’re counting down the days to July 9, 2025, and we can barely contain our excitement! OER Project is about to get a major upgrade, and we can’t wait for you to see what’s in store. Our team has been working...

By OER Project Team Two years ago, OER Project hit a major milestone—our 10th anniversary! If you’ve been with us on this ride, you know big anniversaries bring big emotions. We’re beyond proud of a decade spent sharing what we beli...

By Nate Bowling At no other time in human history would a life like mine have been possible. I’m a US citizen born in the furthest northwest corner of the country—a region that was occupied exclusively by Indigenous people for thousands o...

By Jamais Cascio The future of globalization—the cross-border trade of goods, services, and culture that has been the dominant economic practice since the end of World War II—has become highly uncertain in recent years. Although it’...

With Earth Day right around the corner, it’s the perfect time to check out Climate Project—again, or for the first time. Climate Project is a new take on climate education, designed to equip students with an understanding of the realistic...

By Sam Wineburg Note from the OER Project Team The blog posts shared here, authored by independent contributors, are intended to provide diverse perspectives on issues having significant impact on the field of education. These opinions are solely tho...

By the OER Project Team Not long ago, the idea of AI in the classroom seemed like science fiction. Today, it’s a reality we can’t ignore. As educators, we’ve witnessed technology shift—from computers in the classroom to the in...

By Nate Bowling, Teacher, American Community School of Abu Dhabi Wanted: History Salesperson At its core, teaching world history is a sales job. We have to convince students to care about events and empires far removed from them in space and time. Ho...

By Bennett Sherry and Trevor Getz  We all have our ways of turning off work (or schoolwork) and chilling. But when you teach history, you may find that your job intrudes into your downtime—either because you notice historical inaccuracies ...

By Bram Hubbell Bridging oceans We grow up thinking that history happens on land. We’re taught that societies are land-based and that oceans are borders and barriers. For example, in “America the Beautiful,” we sing about the United...

How do oceans connect societies?  Humans have been sailing the seas for at least the past 80,000 years. Whether in the rafts and dugout canoes used to migrate to Australia and the Americas, or aboard the gigantic cruise ships that travel to port...

By the OER Project Team It’s easy to conflate Black American history with Black history in general—but it’s not possible to teach students to understand the glories and tragedies of the contemporary Black experience without looking ...

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor, OER Project Team At this point in the school year, you and your students may be about to embark on the history of the world wars or maybe even the Cold War. Both are pertinent topics, providing valuable background (a...

By Bennett Sherry and Trevor Getz, OER Project Team The United States funds proxy wars against authoritarian and communist regimes. A Russian leader threatens nuclear retaliation. The US, Russia, and China build elaborate alliance systems agains...

From the start of World War I in 1914 to the end of the Cold War in 1991, the world experienced almost a century of continuous global conflict. While the end of each of these major conflicts of the twentieth century was celebrated as the potential en...

What Did the Ancients Give Us? Many students are unaware of how much our modern world owes to the ancients. But the innovations of ancient societies gave us things such as concrete, the structure of government, makeup, calendars, geometry, and so muc...

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor The legacy of the ancient world is very much alive in the minds of people everywhere. We offer as proof the number of people who visit ancient ruins each year: The ancient Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá in ...

Comparison: Women's Suffrage Around the World The experiences of women throughout history differ across regions and time periods. But in comparing these narratives we can understand how common social expectations and challenges were similar regardles...

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor When students are thinking at the large scales of Big History and world history, they can easily conclude that human history is a story of constant progress. But progress isn’t a straight line; there can be obst...

By James Damico, PhD I'm excited to share some key insights and a practical instructional strategy for creating climate champions in your classroom. Key Insights The 3-D approach – viewing students as detectives, delegates, and doers - provide...

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor We owe a great deal of our modern knowledge about stars to a group of late-nineteenth-century computers. You may be thinking that the use of multiple computers that long ago would be impossible, since the first comput...

After the Big Bang, our Universe was hot, dense plasma. For the first 200 million years of its existence, the Universe was in the Dark Ages. The formation of the first stars made our Universe much more complex and these stars became the engines of li...

Humans have been making maps for thousands of years. In general, maps have gotten more detailed, more complex, and more precise over time. Today, you can find all sorts of maps, from maps depicting the effects of climate change to a map of a theme pa...

By Bennett Sherry, OER Project Team “A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” ...

By Annette O’Boyce As you sit down to grade a stack of essays, ever wish you had a few rubber stamps with certain handy phrases on them? “Add more evidence”; “that’s not a complete sentence”; or “cite your so...