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Evaluating Internet Resources

 So much historical information (along with information in general) is available on the internet that teaching with primary sources and finding answers to questions has never been easier. But how do you know what you find is accurate? A website must analyzed to understand its authorship, point of view, and other issues before you can finally conclude if it is useful or not. 

You can treat a website like a primary source and use a Primary Source Analysis worksheet to evaluate it. Indeed, one reason why teaching with primary sources is so good for students is because it teaches them to look critically at sources and not just accept them at face value.
 
There are other resources that work the same way as analyzing a primary source, but are more specific to internet resources. Here are a few:
 
Evaluating Websites: Grade Appropriate Guides.  Teacher Kathy Schrock has prepared several guides for evaluating internet resources that are appropriate to elementary, middle, and high school students. You can find downloadable PDF versions of each at the website linked above.
 
Five Criteria for Evaluating Websites is an excellent guide for teachers and high school students.

Practical Steps in Evaluating Internet Resources is another useful guide, developed by librarians at Johns Hopkins University.

Stopping to look a source over may slow down your gathering of information, but you will find better information this way. Also, as you get used to looking critically at websites, you will get better at telling the good from the bad.

And of course you should have a few tried and true places for web resources that you go to regularly. A good selection of these is presented on the Historical Resources Page.
 

 

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Narratives of Slavery: Analyzing Primary Sources

In this 5 minute video teachinghistory.org  (you can also read a transcript), historian Richard Follett analyzes two narratives of slavery: an investigative report written by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1853 for the New York Times and Solomon Northrup's book Twelve Years A Slave. He discusses each document separately and then compares their very different perspectives on slavery in Louisiana's sugar growing parishes. Follett models several historical thinking skills, including: close reading;attention to key source information, including who wrote each account, when, and for what purpose; and exploring how to make sense of multiple perspectives and conflicting accounts. Note that the Primary Source Activity Assignment related to the The Slave Trade seminar is on organized on the theme, Point of View.
 

 

 
 

 

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