Using the Web in Social Studies Teaching and Learning

A. Many libraries at colleges and universities offer tutorials in using the web. Often, these tutorials deal with the ever-pressing issue of evaluating the information one finds on the web. In teaching secondary students about making proper use of the Internet as a research tool, attention to the matter of evaluating the veracity of what's on the web is essential.

Among my favorite sites along these lines are the following:

http://www.widener.edu/Tools_Resources/Libraries/Wolfgram_Memorial_Library/480

http://www.library.georgetown.edu/internet/index.htm

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Help/search.html

http://milton.mse.jhu.edu/research/education/practical.html

B. The above sites deal chiefly in what's called "search engines" and "meta-search engines" which help you to find, in varying degrees, what's out there on the Internet. Another approach to finding sources is via "portals" that pull from a more selective body of content information around a particular topic.

For example, the following are portals to social studies materials:

http://www.rowan.edu/mars/depts/seced/meyers/meyers.html

http://www.socialstudies.org

http://www.nytimes.com/learning

http://www.csun.edu/~hcedu013/index.html

http://education.Indiana.edu/~socialst/index.html

Here's a portal put together for businessmen, but with utility for lots of other people:

http://www.ceoexpress.com/default.asp

And, there's the famous Drudge Report:

http://www.drudgereport.com/

Other Internet portals or gateways include the following:

http://www.refdesk.com

http://www.quia.com

http://www.eduhound.com

http://www.iLor.com

Remember, the big search engines (e.g., google, alltheweb, metacrawler, yahoo) only each search a portion of the web. So you need to try several to get at any subject.

C. Webquests

A webquest is a research strategy for inquiry learning and authentic assessment developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University. It's a structured and focused approach to using the web for students in schools who can easily get lost in the overwhelming number of possibilities search engines unfold for them. So much choice also can sometimes bring confusion and distraction, so a teacher-created webquest can help narrow the process considerably and put students doing research on the web in touch with reliable information that will help them handle the inquiry process with less frustration and wasted energy than setting them loose with a search engine.

See Bernie Dodge's webquest pages at:

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/webquest.html

Several other sites also introduce the concept of a webquest:

http://www.tc.edu/faculty/crocco/webquestshabanu.htm

http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/month8/index.html

http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/staffdev/webqmm

Which of the above sites you find most useful in developing webquests for your students is not important. What is important is that teachers, especially those working with middle school and younger high school students recognize the difficulties posed in using the web as a research tool for students. Webquests help control the problem of wasted time and inappropriate web page visits that can crop up when doing web research as a class project.