Commentary: Building Web Research Strategies for Teachers and Students
This paper presents web research strategies for teachers and students to use in building Dramatic Event, Historical Biography, and Influential Literature wiki pages for history/social studies learning. Dramatic Events refer to milestone or turning point moments in history. Historical Biographies and Influential Literature pages feature historically prominent people, both real and fictional. As teachers and students research these topics, they practice accessing and assessing online information while expanding web research and digital literacy skills. They discover how the interactive capacities of wiki technology present people, events and literature in multimodal ways that engage students in deepening history learning. The paper includes sample event, biography, and literature pages hyperlinked to Resources for History Teachers, an award-winning open educational content wiki maintained by the History Teacher Education program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. These model wiki pages incorporate primary and secondary materials, multimedia resources, and multicultural topics for teaching and learning. Students and teachers can use these model pages to construct their own wiki pages tailored to local and state history/social studies curriculum.
