Digital Primary Sources

I think that primary sources can be extremely important teaching tools at every level of Education. Until the development of the Internet, teachers essentially had the choice of not using primary sources or of using primary sources out of set workbooks. In most locations teachers did not have ready access to collections of these sources and even then time constraints made it almost impossible for them to incorporate primary sources of their choosing in their lesson plane. Even for professors at major research universities it was a challenge to use these sources in their classes. Now a teacher in Missoula has access to an incredible amount of information from around the world. This change is revolutionary and has happened amazingly quickly and yet I think we are so used to technology that we sometimes do not realize some of the advantages we have over teachers from a generation ago and take our access to this information for granted. I think the attraction, or perhaps the peril, of digital primary sources is that with so much more material at our fingertips we have a lot more freedom to approach topics in creative ways than we would have before. I think they do present us with more opportunities to teach students how to think critically.
I would use primary sources in one of three ways. One would be for them to be a supplement for what we are talking about. For example when discussing Woodrow Wilson, i’d have a slide of him appear behind me. The second would be a step up Bloom’s taxonomy and would involve students responding to digital primary sources. For instance we could brainstorm what a World War I era propaganda poster meant and what the government hoped to achieve with it. The third, and least common, way would be to drive class. Students would have assignments that would call on them to use their research and evaluative skills in order to find primary source materials of their own that represented the concepts that we have been talking about in class.