Digital Historical Walking Tours: Bringing Local History to Life

Creating digital historical walking tours is an engaging and interactive method for students to learn about local history by pursuing urban historical themes, moments, and spaces in an innovative and useful way. Local history projects are a powerful way for students to develop historical skills, connect with their community, reveal societal changes, and cultivate their own identity. This presentation shares my method of implementing a digital historical walking tour project using two free programs: Pocketsights and Clio. The presentation will include the student learning goals and scaffolded assignments to support student learning throughout the project. Student learning goals for this methodology include a critical analysis of local events/locations, an in-depth examination of the impact of the events/locations on the development of urban space, and to make connections to change over time. Students are required to provide detailed descriptions for local ten sites of historical significance on their walking tour. Each site must include a historical explanation of the importance of the site and include images or videos from the location. The final step for this project is a reflection paper which requires students to evaluate what they have learned from the project and explain how it relates to what they have learned in the course. The digital walking tour enables students to build empathy through seeking connections to local history, while engaging students in “doing” social studies. Many historical institutions include digital walking tours; thus, this project is not only novel and engaging but practical for modern realities.