Instructify

If you’re a history teacher, you probably already know you can’t beat primary sources. This is especially true given the fact that many textbooks are a load of hooey. But like any piece of evidence, students must learn how to evaluate and apply primary sources. And since you’re just one person and can’t screen all the evidence ahead of time, it’s up to you to teach students to assess materials for themselves.

Making Sense of Evidence, a resource from George Mason University’s “History Matters” course, gives students the tools they need to make sense of primary sources in history. Historians will help students examine everything from the meanings of words to historical context. They list questions to ask, and discuss the unique aspects of all manner of sources such as oral histories, letters and diaries, photos and newspapers.

This site is a great way to look at history without leaning on textbooks. If we empower students to learn about history straight from the source, they just might think it’s more interesting than they thought. -BILL FERRIS

Making Sense of Evidence

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Instructifeature: Five Tips to Improve Students’ Information Evaluation

Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs on flickr.com.

Too many schools fear the Internet like your four-year-old nephew fears his bedroom closet. Forget resources like OpenCongress.org or FreeRice – these Luddites think every online kilobyte is infested with scammers, predators, and pornography that magically appears on screen the minute the teacher turns her back. So, after spending thousands of dollars equipping classrooms with computers, some schools try to wall up the Internet where kids won’t find it, like in a story by Edgar Allen Poe.

You and I, of course, know this is useless – kids can access whatever they want at home, and students have been figuring out how to break firewalls since they were invented. But how do you convince your school administrators that removing the barriers will open students to a veritable gold mine of educational tools?

It’s up to good Web citizens like you to be an advocate for educational technology. Don’t worry, you don’t have to fight this battle unarmed. Instructify presents these three rules to help you.

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So your students need to do research for your latest assignment. You’ve probably shown them a few Web-based tools to make their lives easier, too, like Footnote or SlideShare.

Nowadays kids can find out almost everything they want to know online. But as the Luddites love to point out, the Web’s full of half-truths and stuff that’s just plain incorrect. Anybody with an ISP can communicate anything they want to the entire world. So how do you separate the PhD who wants to share his knowledge about Physics from the guy who thinks he’s a scientist because he watched a few episodes of Nova?

If you want your students to grow into intelligent, productive members of society (hint: you do), the best lesson you can teach kids is how to separate the nuts from the nougat for themselves.

With that in mind, here are 5 strategies students (and you) can use to figure out what information is worth citing, and what is worthless.

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