HIST 400 -- Teaching Secondary School Social Studies (Fall 2004)
Teach yourself a topic and develop a lesson around it
Use information resources to update your knowledge and plan lessons
Using Keywords
How do we go from knowing nothing about a topic to knowing something?
Finding Overviews of the Literature
- AHA Guide to Historical Literature REF D20.A5 1995
Finding Books
Finding Scholarly Journal Articles
Finding Popular Magazine Articles
Finding Primary Sources, Web Sites, Lesson Plans
Evaluating results through comparison and corroboration
Compare results from several sources and several types of sources to identify facts, trends and analyses
- Case study: My Lai massacre
- Google - my lai massacre
- Orient yourself and collect terms, concepts, related terms, broader terms, narrower terms, names of people and places. Note variant spellings
- Compare coverage between different sites, note similarities and differences, depth of content, bias
- Compare to a reference point
- Consider an advanced Google search with domain limited to .gov, .org, .edu, etc.
- Consider a Google search in Images, Groups, News
- Note trends - is one Web site consistently linked to? Why?
- Does any information need special attention and corroboration?
- Don't stop with the free Web. Compare different document types: scholarly journal articles, books, popular magazine articles, primary sources
- Find book reviews in America History and Life (select "book review")
- To find divergent viewpoints, consider various stakeholders
- Consider international perspectives
Marc Meola
Humanities Librarian
609-771-3217
