Digital Primary Sources

I believe that Digital Primary Sources are excellent tools to use in the classroom. It is important, however, for instructors to recognize the prep time required for sorting through and selecting appropriate sources that effectively advance the lesson objective. Taking the time now to familiarize oneself with the various online teaching resources for digital primary sources, such as DHR and the National Archives' Teaching with Documents section, will be a tremendous time-saver down the road. The Delicious website will certainly help keep teachers organized and make their favorite digital resources easily accessible by their students.

One of the beauties of primary sources is that they can be incorporated in almost any part of a lesson. Images and music are great hooks for initiatory sets, completing a digital source analysis worksheet of a journalist's account of the Vietnam War would be a great strategy for groupwork, and replying to a letter from a Civil War soldier would make for an engaging assessment. The biggest challenges teachers will face in incorporating primary source documents will not be in helping students navigate the websites, as today's students are generally familar with this technology, but in helping students navigate the meaning and purpose of the documents they are using. However, now that we have more accessibilty than ever to these documents, students will become more comfortable and therefore more successfull at decoding and comprehending the words and images of the past.