Built for teachers and history educators: the new Vermont History Explorer

If you’ve visited the Vermont Historical Society’s education website, Vermont History Explorer, you probably remember it as a site designed for students. It was a colorful corner of the internet where kids could click through Vermont’s story one photograph, one “This Day in History” entry at a time. It’s been a beloved resource for nearly two decades, and it still has plenty of that spirit. But, something has shifted.

Vermont History Explorer is becoming a site for educators.

This is the result of two things happening at once:

• First, we kept hearing the same thing from teachers: we are stretched thin. Less planning time. More pressure to connect every lesson to proficiencies and standards. An ongoing challenge to make history feel alive for students who’ve grown up scrolling rather than reading.
• Second, the world for which our original site was built has changed. Fewer students are freely browsing within classrooms. Parents and districts are, understandably, more cautious about the sites that are available, and classroom technology use is far more directed and supervised than it was when Vermont History Explorer first launched. A site designed for independent student exploration makes less sense in that landscape. Teachers, meanwhile, desire access to vetted resources and lesson plans that have been created using quality sources that place Vermont history within a local and national context.

So, that is what the education team at the Vermont Historical Society is building. Think of the new Vermont History Explorer as VHS’s hub for educators.

The old site asked, “What can a curious student discover here?” The new version asks: “What does a Vermont teacher need, whether they’re building a full unit from scratch or just want to weave in one strong Vermont history resource?” Head to the homepage now, and you will see a simple, direct welcome: Vermont History Explorer is your resource for bringing Vermont history to life in the classroom and beyond.

Rather than scattering resources across disconnected pages, the site is organized to help a fourth-grade teacher build a unit on Vermont statehood or a middle school teacher prep students for their first History Day project can find what they need. The site fans out into exactly the kind of practical categories a teacher is scanning for regularly, such as: Field Trip Booking, Lesson Plans grouped by grade band, Professional Development, and a growing Educator Resources section. Primary sources are pulled straight from VHS’s own collections and paired with sources from repositories like the Library of Congress. When another organization has a better resource, we’ll link to it. A quality educational hub isn’t afraid to point confidently somewhere else when necessary.

Teachers today have many options for online content.  Other sites have an amazing volume of content or trusted resources on a national scale. What we can offer is something none of them can: Vermont. Primary sources pulled from our own archive. Lesson plans grounded in the actual towns, rivers, and people our students pass every day. A resource built by the institution that has been the keeper of this state’s history for nearly 200 years. Free, curated, and specific to the place students live.

When a teacher in the Northeast Kingdom, the Champlain Valley, or the southern Vermont hill towns pulls a resource from this site and uses it in their classroom, that’s when VHS’ mission happens in real time. Helping Vermonters understand where they come from isn’t an abstraction; it’s a Wednesday afternoon lesson plan.  

This shift lines up with Vermont’s 250th anniversary of becoming an independent republic. This moment calls for hyperlocal storytelling initiatives like VT250 and the student archive project All In Vermont, which invites students to research their own town’s history and add it to a statewide map.  

The best hub for Vermont history education is one that everyone teaching it, in whatever setting, helps build. Transformation takes time. This is a work in progress There’s a short survey on the site right now asking what should come next, and whether you’re a classroom teacher, a librarian, a homeschool parent, or someone running an after-school or museum program, we genuinely want your answer.

So, take a few minutes and poke around. Look into a guided Hands-on History field trip for your students. See if Vermont History Day fits into your curriculum, your after-school club, or as an independent study for a student who’s ready to run with a topic on their own.

If you're not a teacher, but are a longtime member, donor, or just someone who loves Vermont’s past, this website is one of the clearest, most direct ways your support shows up in a classroom.

Vermont History Explorer started as a way to help students discover their own state’s story. Now, it’s becoming something just as valuable: a way to support the people who teach it.