Chapter 4 - Empowering Students With Technology

Chapter 4 - Accessing Primary Sources to Enhance Critical Thinking

Using primary sources is essential to learning in the classroom. With technology, primary sources have come alive with authentic feedback which can be managed in every classroom. Not all students come prepared with being able to successfully research a subject using primary resources. The role of the teacher is to provide structure and direction to a student's ability to make meaning of their primary source discoveries.

Teaching students to be diligent in evaluating primary resources before using them is the classroom teacher's responsibility. Teachers need to have students question the authenticity of the resource, raise questions to probe students' thinking skills, help students excess experts to correspond or converse with and finding authentic audiences for students. In doing so, students will become less vulnerable to misinformation on the Internet.