What to include:
What makes a useful social studies links page? Basically, a page
is useful if it saves you time finding material you know is out there "somewhere"
on the Web. Think about including links in the following
categories:
1. Search Engines. I find it useful to have a page of links
to the search engines I use most often.
This is not necessarily a good starting point for anyone else, though.
For your students, you might want to include only one or two engines.
Yahoo! is probably the single most
useful search engine. I especially like the access to world-wide
newspapers in their "news" category. For graphics, All
the Web works well and it does screen out objectionable content pretty
well. Your students might also find useful a multi-search engine
like Metacrawler.
2. A source for current news events. Unfortunately, Yahoo! and the
other search engines are associated with CNN, MSNBC and the other rather
"major" news outlets, and they tend to give you the same extraordinarily
limited look at what's important as your average tv news show.
The Web has a lot more to offer! As a start, look at the links provided
by Matt Drudge. He includes
links to the AP Wire, to lots of major newspapers, to all sorts of columnists,
to the Reuters Wire, and to all sorts of other news sources.
3. A source for recent (but not necessarily current) news events.
Unfortunately, most of the on-line newspapers won't let you search back
more than a few days without subscribing. Northern has some excellent
sources (see, for instance, the on-line
data bases), but many of these are available to you only while you
are a Northern Student. It's probably a good idea to become familiar
with resources made available through the South
Dakota State Library. These resources will be available to you
wherever you teach. My favorite site for recent events is Free
Republic. Free Republic participants ("Freepers") post articles
from all over the Web, and then add long discussion threads. You
can search the site easily and pull up major stories about almost anything
that's happened in the last year.
5. Links to links! You will probably find it useful to include
links to good lists of links in each social sciences field. Try to
find the best site to use as a jumping off point for your students.
For example, you might include a link to the History
E site as the starting point for students looking for history resources.
More to follow....