10 Web Resources To Help Teach About Primary Sources

"There is such an overload of information. Students need to be able to identify and decode sources, then make a decision as to what they mean in terms of causes and consequences. It is a skill that touches upon several of the Common Cores–standards that deal with identifying and analyzing the perspective of the speaker, standards that deal with research, formulating arguments, and even standards that ask students to pick out and effectively create analyses based on mathematics–either by interpreting the numbers in in front of them, or by creating experiments or analyzing random samples to arrive at and communicate conclusions.  Students must be able to seek out, recognize, and use sources effectively and appropriately. Primary sources–whether they are numerical, documents, interviews, tweets, or posts allow them to go right to the source. This helps them in life–as anyone who has ever compiled reports, researched, made a business decision, worked with customers, or managed people knows, these skills are higher-level thinking and completely transferable to life."