Assignment # 2

My first two categories really go hand in hand. However, to start off, when studying history, it is extremely important to have the facts correct. My goal with these websites was to provide a way that students could find basic information on a person, place, or topic easily. The internet if full of information, however, not all of the information out there is true. There are websites on the internet that are highly unreliable, the most widely-known is Wikipedia. Although, this shouldn't scare students away from finding useful information on the internet. It is the place most easily accessible for students, especially those without cars and who are not within walking distance of the library. This is why I have chosen these web pages and posted them in a groups of databases. The first, Answers.com, is a fairly new site and it seems highly reliable. Unlike Wikipedia, Answers.com pulls excerpts from other resources online. For example, when the term "WWII" is searched a variety of resources a brought up including: The American Heritage Dictionary, Oxford University Press, and Britannica Precise Encyclopedia. As a student it is important to find reliable sources, and even more important to find reliable sources that are easily accessible.

My second category was a step beyond the first. Once students have found strong reliable information about a topic they are researching, they can then investigate what other people may think about it or have written about it. For example, after clicking on the HNN Blogs link, and after entering in the term "WWII" again, pages and pages of blogs pop up in the search. Some of these are from news paper articles others are from personal blogs from professors or educated people. However, some are simply just people who have only dropped the term WWII into their blog for one reason or another. This gives the students a chance to decipher what is fact and what is fiction, what is reliable and what is unreliable. This can add a new perspective on writing research papers. Students can branch out from only using facts and personal opinion, to current or recent public opinion and individual opinion. I do admit that these searches are less reliable then the ones in the previous category, but this is a new idea for research.

My third category is multimedia. I was a little upset that I couldn't locate a good number of sources for this category. However, the onces that I did find are exceptional. The History Channel website is full of video, speeches, pictures, links to just about anything. It is really impressive. Digital History is really interesting as well. There are many different sections of that site, but one thing that I found really neat was the Interactive Timeline. As you dragged the bar across the screen different icons would appear. When highlighted, these icons would display information about an event or place. If the icon was clicked on, a page would pop-up about the subject of the icon. The Discovery Channel has similar aspects to The History Channel, but the topics discussed are slightly different. The neat things about web pages like these is that, students could use these videos, speeches, pictures in presentations and multimedia reports. Instead of simple papers being turning in, students could create blogs with links and moving parts encompassing all of their research on a broad array of media fields.

The fourth category is really straight forward. I tried to find sites full of ideas for projects that could be used in a social studies environment. The students will hopefully see what other people have done in the past and begin to formulate ideas that they want to do. The hard thing about history is that it has already happened and it is not going to change, but hopefully, after reading about what some people have done, the students' minds will be charged full of new ideas on exploring the past and making it come to life. Also, social studies is not just history. It is great for students to get involved in their world today and the social and political events that are happening all around them.

Since it is important for students to remain on top of the world's happenings, I thought it would be useful to have access to news from all around the world. Now obviously, these news sites are not from everywhere on the globe, because the students and myself included only speak English, for the most part. However, seeing the different perspectives from Seattle to New York and then to England can make a huge difference on how a person views a certain event or actions of a person.