"Teaching with Colorado's Heritage"
Module 7: Using Digital Primary Sources with Students

Using digital primary sources with students is not difficult, but does require some special planning.

Introducing Primary Sources
Define "primary sources" for your students and bring to class real objects that they can explore, such as letters, photos, and clothing or other artifacts from home. Hold a "Primary Source Roadshow", with every student bringing in something that is important to them and have them take turns telling why the object is important to them and what it is/was used for.

Choosing sources
When using primary sources with students, select primary sources that are appropriate for developmental level of students. Specifically, consider the reading level of your students if you plan to use written documents. If you plan to take excerpts from lengthy documents, choose excerpts that represent the document as a whole. See Module 11: Using documents and texts for more information about excerpting.

Use primary sources in a way that requires students to think critically, analyze and/or synthesize information. Encourage them to carefully observe what they see and hear. Draw on their prior knowledge to find out what understanding they already have about the documents. Stimulate their critical thinking skills to encourage further questioning and research (Looking into Holidays Past through Primary Sources, 2003). Basic questions to ask students to support these important skills can be: What do you observe? What do you think you know? What do you want to find out?

Present the metadata (biobliographic information) with every primary source used, so the source is not taken out of context. Consider the reliability of a primary source itself (see module 3) as well as the website it came from if it is a digitized primary source. Read Reference Shelf: Evaluating Online Resources (http://edsitement.neh.gov/reference_shelf_evaluating.asp) from EDSITEment for more information about evaluating the reliability of websites.

When using primary sources with students, you may encounter a racist or sexist viewpoint. There are many ways to deal with this, such as pre-selecting the images your students will see, educating them about the time period beforehand, ask them to compare how times have changed, etc. Complete the following activity about this subject.

Activity

• Respect, Tolerance, and Understanding, or Prepare for Politically Incorrect
• Read "Activities for the instructional cycle" from the Library of Congress American Memory Learning Page for more information about choosing primary sources and how they can fit into all phases of instruction.

Analyzing primary sources

Analysis guides are a wonderful tool to use and are a good starting point to help organize the thoughts of students as they learn to analyze primary sources.

Several good analysis guides are listed below. Alternatively, you can adapt one to meet your needs or create one of your own:

• Primary Source Analysis Guide
• Media Analysis Tools (American Memory)
• Document Analysis Worksheets (NARA)

After the students have completed their analysis individually or in small groups, remember to leave time for a discussion for the entire class, to discuss the various interpretations. Allowing time for follow-up research to confirm analysis and answer questions and bringing in secondary sources is an essential part of the inquiry process.

Activity

• Interpretation Tools Needed

Planning for technology needs
Consider the availability and accessibility of technology to your classroom and the age of your students. Using the wide array of digitized primary sources is still possible even with few or no computers in the classroom. Which of the following scenarios will be possible?:

• Scheduled time in a computer lab or the library to give each student/group of students access to the computer. Plan on no more than three students per computer. Having access to a computer is critical if you want your students to learn to search on-line and locate their own primary sources. You may chose to have students free reign in searching sites, or you may want to have them chose from a list of primary sources that you have already chosen. If searching for sources through an on-line database will be part of the lesson plan time for students to learn how to search and to practice searching.
• Classroom stations where one of the stations includes access to the teacher's computer.
• Primary sources displayed on an overhead projector/ or computer projector.
• Primary sources printed onto paper.

Resources
Looking into Holidays Past through Primary Sources. 1/24/03. Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/doc_analysis/introduction_winter.html