Creating a Social Studies Links Page

The World Wide Web is a wonderful resource for social studies students and teachers.  It provides news from around the world, complete texts of government documents, and all sorts of primary source material for the study of history, government, geography, and the other social sciences.  However, most students end up taking a kind of garage sale approach to the Web: they can find many interesting items, but they have trouble finding the specific thing they want.  Looking for information on genocide in Bangladesh?  A student without guidance will take hours to find what he/she needs, if they find the information at all.

 To make the Web anything more than a high-tech toy, social studies teachers need to know well the most important resources available for classroom use and the best ways of seeking out material in each of the social sciences.  They need to know how to avoid the “garage sale” or “needle in a hay stack” kind of search themselves and how to enable their students to find needed information efficiently.

For this assignment, I’d like you organize a set of links to World Wide Web sites useful for social studies students and teachers.  In particular, be sure to have links to news sources, government documents, quick reference sources, and guides to primary sources for the study of the social sciences.

In creating your pages, you might follow the order suggested below:

1.  Look over some of the links pages from previous semesters.  Note what you like and don't like.  You might find  Robert Lech's Social Studies Links a good model.

2.  Browse through some sample history/social science link collections.

3.  Decide what you are going to call your own links page.  All pages names must end with an .htm or .html tag.

4.  Set up a link on your home page to your social studies links page.  In the "text" section, put something like "Social Studies Links."  In the "link to" section, use the page name selected in step one above (e.g., sslinks.htm).

5.  Go to Netscape Commicator and open a new blank page.

6.  Type in the heading for your page (e.g, "Your Guide in the Great Search for Truth")

7.  Publish your page.

8.  Make a plan for organizing your links.  You might find a flow chart useful.

9.  Start collecting and classifying links.  Remember that more is not necessarily better.  A few good links are sometimes a lot more helpful than a lot of not-so-good links.

10. Consider annotating  your collection of links.   Your students may be much better served by a relatively brief collection of annotated links than by the lengthy lists of unreviewed sites many of us put together.

11. Your page will be evaluated in accord with the following criteria:
 


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