Inquiry and Literacy Web Resources: Each of the Web sites listed below provide information, resources, and tools for working with sources, critical thinking and literacy, and doing inquiry in social studies or history.

Artifact & Analysis: The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies and the College Board collaborated on this Web site so that students will see objects and art works as primary sources that are worthy of historical investigation. The site has sections on artifacts and documents, a teaching guide, essays, writing assignments, and several student handouts that scaffold students’ thinking about artifacts and primary sources. http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/idealabs/ap/index.htm 

Digital History Inquiry Project: This is a collaborative project among three universities to provide resources and tools for social studies teachers on the methods of historical inquiry. It provides a set of resources, lesson plans, and sections on digital historical inquiry, and “how history is best learned.” http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/

Historical Inquiry: This site is part of a project for “scaffolding wise practices in the history classroom. It provides background information, strategies, tutorials, and resources for historical inquiry and understanding the past. It offers the SCIM-C (Summarizing, Contextualizing, Inferring, Monitoring, and Corroborating) strategy for interpreting history. http://www.historicalinquiry.com/index.cfm

The National History Project Analysis Guides: An excellent site that provides historical thinking and analysis guides, background on history’s habits of mind, and heuristics for doing historical analysis and interpretation. http://www.history.ilstu.edu/nhp/terminology.html

History Matters: A project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning that provides guides and interactive activities for analyzing a range of primary sources (photos, oral histories, maps, films, letters, diaries, numbers, ads, etc.). “Scholars in Action” segments show how scholars puzzle out the meaning of different kinds of primary sources, allowing students to try to make sense of documents and then providing audio clips (or text) in which leading scholars interpret the document and discuss strategies for overall analysis. http://historymatters.gmu.edu

Finding World History: This Web site is the world history version of History Matters. (See above.) It provides sections on “unpacking evidence,” “analyzing documents,” and “teaching sources.” http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/whmfinding.php

US National Archives and Records Administration’s Digital Classroom: NARA provides a set of document analysis worksheets for several different primary sources (written documents, photos, cartoons, posters, maps, artifacts, sound recording, and motion pictures). http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/analysis_worksheets/worksheets.html

The Library of Congress’ “The Learning Page”: The Library of Congress provides guides, activities, and lessons to help students learn about primary sources and how to analyze and interpret primary sources. It provides questions to guide students’ analyses of primary sources, a time and place rule, and a bias rule to support student thinking about primary sources. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/psources/pshome.html The Library of Congress’ Primary Source Toolkit: http://rs6.loc.gov/learn/educators/workshop/discover/toolkit.html

Index Historiae: The historian, Robert Berkhofer, provides a set of study aids for students. These include “reading primary sources,” “reading secondary sources,” and a ten-step process for writing source analysis papers. http://homepages.wmich.edu/~rberkhof/studyaids/index.html

Digital History Reader: DHR offers two components; one on US History and another on “Modern Europe in a Global Context.” Designed for introductory level survey courses at colleges and universities, it provides modules based on historical questions and provides contextual information, evidence for students to investigate, and assignments. http://www.dhr.history.vt.edu/

Do History: This site provides an interactive case study of Martha Ballard based on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale and shows students how to piece together the past from the fragments that have survived. It provides a “history toolkit” for student use. http://www.dohistory.org/

Center for History and New Media: CHNM at George Mason University provides many resources and tools for using digital media and new technologies to conduct historical inquiry. These tools include “Zotero,” a research tool for gathering, organizing, and annotating source materials, a “Web Scrapbook,” a “Timeline Builder,” and many other tools and resources, including blogs by historians and essays on history and new media. http://chnm.gmu.edu/

The Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History Project: This site offers several historical mysteries and provides documents for students to work with, materials to help them contextualize the cases, and different historical interpretations (password protected).  http://www.canadianmysteries.ca/indexen.html

Historical Scene Investigation: This site uses the metaphor of crime scene investigation (like the popular TV show, CSI) and has students act as “detectives to investigate evidence, work with clues and then “crack the case.” http://www.hsionline.org

The Mystery of Sam Smiley: This is a contemporary mystery for student inquiry. It’s not as appealing as the historical cases but it structures student inquiry. http://filebox.vt.edu/users/tsnedike/Sam_Smiley/sswebfinal/index.html

Thinking Critically about Discipline-Based World Wide Web Resources: This UCLA College Library site offers several points to consider regarding Web sites for subject disciplines. http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/help/critical/discipline.htm

Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources: This site offers several questions for evaluating the content, source, and design of Web sites. http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/help/critical/index.htm

Critical Viewing and Critical Thinking Skills: The Center for Media Literacy provides many useful resources for visual literacy, teaching media literacy, and deconstructing media representations.  http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article202.html

Tolerance.Org Site Check: Site Check walks the reader of a Web site through a series of questions to help evaluate the appropriateness of a specific Web site for classroom use or for research purposes. At the end of the tutorial, students can print their assessment of the site for future reference. The questions can also be downloaded as a pdf. file. http://www.tolerance.org/teach/web/site_check/index.jsp

5 Criteria for Evaluating Web Sites & Critically Analyzing Information Sources: Guides provided by Cornell University’s libraries. http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/webcrit.html http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill26.htm

New Basics Project: This site, created by the Queensland’s Department of Education and the Arts, gives a good overview of multiliteracies and communications media http://education.qld.gov.au/corporate/newbasics/html/curric-org/comm.html

Multiliteracies:This site looks at the role of multiliteracies and literacy as a social practice in “Investigating Identity and Power Relations.” http://www.thenetwork.sa.edu.au/identity_web/multiliteracies.html

Tools for Reading the World: NoodleTools offers tools, guides, and activities for 21st century literacies, such as visual literacy, historical literacy, cultural literacy, information literacy, scientific literacy, and mathematical literacy. http://noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/21c.html

Johns Hopkins University’s site on Evaluating Information Found on the Internet: This site discusses the criteria by which scholars in most fields evaluate print information, and shows how the same criteria can be used to assess information found on the Internet. http://www.library.jhu.edu/researchhelp/general/evaluating/index.html

Digital Literacy: Rethinking Education & Training in a Digital World: A site provided by Portland State University with information about media studies, media literacy, constructivist learning theories, and curriculum development. http://digitalliteracy.mwg.org/studies.html http://digitalliteracy.mwg.org/curriculum/integrating.html

Resources for Studying Propaganda: This site from the Institute for Propaganda Analysis provides information about common propaganda techniques, questions that can help students identify these techniques, and examples that students can analyze. http://www.propagandacritic.com/

UC Berkeley Library’s Finding Information on the Internet: The UC Berkeley Library provides “A Tutorial: Evaluating Web Pages - Techniques to Apply and Questions to Ask.” http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html

Critical Media Literacy in Times of War: As the site explains, “this site focuses on U.S. foreign policy, military invasion and war, because controversies like WAR test the freedom of expression in a democracy.” It provides modules to help compare domestic and international reporting, analyze sources, word choice, and point of view, and examine how different media offer different reporting. http://www.tandl.vt.edu/Foundations/mediaproject/

Critical Literacy: Produced by the Department of Education in Tasmania, this site examines elements of Critical literacy as the analysis and critique of the relationships among texts, language, power, social groups and social practices. The section on “What kinds of critical questions can we ask of texts?” is especially good. http://www.education.tas.gov.au/english/critlit.htm#howdoes

A Brief History of Critical Thinking: Provided by The Critical Thinking Community, this site gives a good overview of critical thinking and its history. The site also includes “35 Dimensions of Critical Thought.” http://www.criticalthinking.org/aboutCT/briefHistoryCT.shtml http://www.criticalthinking.org/resources/TRK12-strategy-list.shtml#s16

Web Inquiry Projects: This site provides tools for guided and open inquiry using a six-state “spiral path of inquiry.” Based on inquiry-oriented WebQuests to engage students in using the Internet, WIPs encourage students to answer inquiry-oriented questions by seeking and working with online resources. The site provides teacher templates for carrying out WIPs.  http://edweb.sdsu.edu/wip/

Writer’s Toolbox for Building Arguments: This is the companion Web site designed to accompany Writing Arguments, Brief, and Concise Edition, 2nd Edition, by John D. Ramage, John C. Bean, and June Johnson. Created for students and instructors, this site both highlights key concepts and resources of Writing Arguments and offers new material that builds on and extends these resources. Especially useful is the “Writer's Toolbox for Building Arguments,” which provides reading and writing strategies that can help you with many different writing projects. http://cwabacon.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/ramage2_ab/chapter18/deluxe.html

The University of North Carolina’s Writing Center Resources for Writing: This site provides handouts and tools for writing that include writing arguments, thinking about your audience, writing introductions and conclusions, using evidence and counterarguments, reading critically, and writing papers in specific fields such as history, political science, sociology, and philosophy. It also includes a section on “Writing in History.” http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/argument.html http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/history.html